Templates for charts and other objects

Question

Hi, new to this group, and a newbie to Macs, too.
When I do my own presentations, not relying on the templates of Keynote, I notice that when I insert a chart or any object, it looks so, what's the word? so bland and even unattractive.
So kindly allow me three questions:
First, how do I access the nice-looking charts and objects of the Keynote templates without having to open one up and cutting and pasting them on my presentation?
Second, where do I find the textures that the chart templates use for background? In which folder are they stored?
And third, which is, I suppose, a frequent plea, where can one find other templates? The ones available on the Internet aren't as well-composed as the bundled ones.
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

1. You can't, the chart settings are built into each theme, there's no way to get them without opening a theme. One thing you COULD do though, is make a bunch of cool charts, and copy and paste them into a "holding" file that you open when you need it. Then you won't have to constantly make an empty file, create a table and copy and paste it. The other alternative, especially if you like one particular style and will likely use it most of the time, is to lock in the table style to your own file once you've used it on your own slide once. You can find that function under the Advanced menu.
2. They aren't stored in a folder. With Keynote 1, Apple did provide you with a .key file that had chips of color or texture in it, but now they don't. You could create your own by making a bunch of objects, and then using the Copy Style functions in Keynote to copy the style of say, a colored bar in a chart, onto say, a square you just made in your new file.
As for the templates found on the web being not as well composed as the Apple one's, I beg to differ. Have you seen Keynotepro or keynotethemepark? My stuff (Keynoteuser.com) isn't as snazzy or artistic (though I think it's more usefull in most cases for the business world than many of the Apple templates) the stuff the other sites are doing is up there in quality to Apple's. Keynotepro especially is churning out stuff that in my opinion is better than Apple's.