Add comments and highlight text in a Keynote presentation

You and people you're collaborating with on a presentation can add comments to text, objects, charts, table cells, and slides. Comments are useful for making notes to yourself, asking questions of reviewers, and conveying editorial suggestions.

You can also highlight text without adding a comment. When you don’t want comments and highlights to be visible, you can hide them.

Add, read, or delete comments

Comments are indicated with a square marker in the left margin of the slide or next to an object. In table cells with a comment, a triangle appears in the corner. You can also add a general comment not associated with specific text or objects anywhere on a slide.

Do any of the following:

Add a comment: Select text, an object, or a table cell, or click an empty area of the slide, then click in the toolbar. Type your comment, then click outside the comment to finish.
Comments you add directly to the slide are always open.
Read a comment: Click the comment marker. Click the right and left arrows on the comment to jump to the next or previous comment.
Delete a comment: Click the highlighted text or comment marker, then click Delete in the comment.
Change the size of comment text: Choose Keynote > Preferences (from the Keynote menu at the top of your screen), then click General. Click the Text Size pop-up menu, then choose a size.

Mark text with a highlight

When you add a comment, the text is automatically highlighted; you can keep the highlight without writing a comment. Comments and highlights aren’t visible in printed presentations.

When multiple people are working on a presentation, each person’s comments and highlights appear in a unique color.

Note: If you want highlights that print, add color behind the text instead. Color added behind text looks like a highlight and can be in any color, so it's not associated with a specific author.

Select the text you want to highlight.
Do one of the following:
- Click in the toolbar.
  The selected text is highlighted and a comment opens. If you don't want to add a comment, click anywhere on the presentation to close the comment. The text remains highlighted.
- Choose Insert > Highlight (from the Insert menu at the top of your screen).

To remove a highlight, move the pointer over the highlighted text, then click Delete in the comment that appears. If no comment appears, that means the highlight was added as color behind the text. To remove the color, remove the character fill color.

You can’t highlight text in table cells, but you can add conditional highlighting to a cell to change a cell’s appearance based on its value.

Show or hide comments

Do one of the following:

Click in the toolbar, then choose either Show Comments or Hide Comments.

Choose View > Comments > Show Comments or Hide Comments (from the View menu at the top of your screen).