Embed one project into another (nesting)

Question

One feature that I would love to have in a slide show software is the ability to embed one project into another. Is this a feature of Keynote?
Here is where it would be handy:
I was in a band an we needed to put all of the lyrics for our original songs up on the big screen when we were playing. Neither or "set list" nor order was finalized, but was going to be 10 songs out of a possible 15. We wouldn't know until only minutes before going on. Since I play bass and had to be on stage, I had to have it simple enough for a 12 year old kid to run the presentation.
I could figure no way that I could possibly cut and paste and remove all the slides into the correct order right before going on stage. I worried about this for 2 days and figured out what to do.
I used Adobe Indesign and set each song up as it's own file. Then using InDesign's build book feature, I linked all the files into a book file. 5 minutes before the show, I resorted the chapters in the book file, and exported to PDF. I ran the PDF in full screen mode and the 12 year old girl just sat there and hit the spacebar for our songs. It worked perfectly.
Is there a way that I can do separate projects in Keynote and assemble them quickly like I did with InDesign and Acrobat?
Thanks,
Kirk

Answer 1

OK, if you don't want them all in the same Keynote file so you can hyperlink around the file to the desired slide numbers, then try this.
Create your Keynote of a song. Name it easily so you can find it easily. At the end of each song keynote, put a "Return to Index" and hyperlink it to the Keynote with the program. On the program slide you can Name the songs, Song 1, Song 2, Song 3, and Song 4. Of course, you can enter the name of the song in the program slide. If you use the generic name the process of creating the hyperlink is an easy one (it's even easy if you enter the name of the song you want). If you keep all song Keynotes in the same folder with the index, it's a matter of selecting the file title as the Keynote slideshow to hyperlink to. So you can change the four songs in a program presentation in about 2 minutes max. so you get:
File name: Agenda
Modern Church of God
Sunday, October 10, 2010
Reverent I M. Religious, presiding
10:30 am
Call to order
Song 1 (hyperlink to "Rock of Ages")
Processional
Prayer
Song 2 (hyperlink to "Bringing in the Sheaves")
Announcements
Reading
Song 2 (hyperlink to "Ave Maria")
Sermon, "How do we maximize our resources."
Song 3 ((hyperlink to "Jesus Loves Me")
Digressional
Song 4 (Oh, What I friend we have in Jesus)
At the end of the Rock of Ages lyrics Place
"Return to Program" and hyperlink to "Agenda"
For the next week, "Agenda 10/17" Change the hyperlinks for songs to the new selection of keynotes you have created earlier. It will take about a minute or two to make the changes. You do each one by clicking the Enable hyperlink selection box when one of the song references is selected. The pull the pull down menu to Keynote Slideshow. A box will open. Go to your folder with all song and agenda files. Select the song keynote you want to access with the click, when you select the song file and click "Open" your connection is made. You then project the agenda file on Sunday morning. When you reach song 1, you click on it and the song's keynote comes up. When the song is finished, click on Return to Program and your program Keynote is back up.
The only time consumer in this process is entering the song lyrics into their own keynote files. If you have somewhere to copy and paste the words, then it's easy. The mechanics of creating the weekly connection is very easy. Once you have your resources created, preparation time for a Sunday program will be only a long as it takes you to enter the planned agenda components.