Typewriter Effect in Keynote: Use the Keyboard Build

Keynote has a typewriter effect, but it isn’t called Typewriter. It’s a build named Keyboard. Select your text box, click Animate in the toolbar, then Build In → Add an Effect → Keyboard. The text types on letter by letter with a cursor, and you get one setting for speed. I tested everything below in Keynote 14.4 on a Mac on 11 November 2026.

Add the Keyboard build on a Mac

1. Click the text box once so the whole box is selected. You don’t need to highlight the words.
2. Click Animate at the right end of the toolbar. The Animate sidebar opens.
3. Make sure the Build In tab is selected, then click Add an Effect.
4. In the first group of effects, Appear & Move, choose Keyboard. It sits between Iris and Move In. Keynote plays a preview as soon as you click it.
5. Set Duration. This is the time the whole line takes to type.
6. Leave Cursor ticked if you want the bar that travels in front of the letters, or untick it for letters alone.
7. Click Preview to watch it again.

If you picked something else first, the button reads Change instead of Add an Effect. It opens the same list.

People look for the word Typewriter because older tutorials and a 2018 thread on Apple’s forum use it. In the Keynote I tested there is nothing by that name in the Build In list, and the app has no switch for bringing back retired effects. Keyboard is the one to use.

Set the speed and the cursor

Duration belongs to the whole box, so a long sentence types faster than a short one at the same setting. My 25-character test line took the default 3 seconds, which is about 8 characters a second and looks a little sleepy. Somewhere between 10 and 15 characters a second reads as a person typing.

The field accepted anything from 0.01 seconds up to 60 when I typed values in. Sixty seconds is the ceiling: I entered 500 and Keynote changed it to 60.

The cursor is a thin bar. It moves with the last typed letter, it doesn’t blink, and it disappears when the line is complete. You can’t change its colour or thickness. If you want a fat block cursor that keeps blinking after the text lands, Keynote can’t draw it, and that’s the point where I’d use a GIF instead (more on that below).

Direction has two values. Forward types from the first letter. Backward reveals the line from its last letter towards its first, which is rarely what you want coming in but is exactly right going out.

Choose when the typing starts

A new build waits for a click. To have the title type by itself when the slide opens, Apple’s guide says to click Build Order at the bottom of the Animate sidebar, select the build, and change Start from On Click to After Transition. The Delay field next to it holds the typing back for as long as you set.

The same menu chains builds together: After Build 1 starts a second line when the first one finishes, and With Build 1 starts them together. I’m describing this window from Apple’s documentation, not from my own test, so check the labels against your version.

Type several lines one at a time

With more than one paragraph in the box, the Delivery menu decides how they arrive. All at Once treats the box as a single build. By Paragraph types one paragraph per click, which suits a list you talk through point by point. The other two options, By Paragraph Group and By Highlighted Paragraph, are for indented lists.

Remember that Duration is shared. With By Paragraph, a three-word bullet and a twenty-word bullet won’t type at the same pace. If the difference bothers you, put the long line in its own text box with its own Keyboard build and a longer duration.

Make the text backspace away

Keyboard is also in the Build Out list, and this is the part most Keynote tutorials miss.

1. With the text box selected, click the Build Out tab in the Animate sidebar.
2. Click Add an Effect and choose Keyboard.
3. Set Direction to Backward.
4. Set a shorter duration than the build in. Deleting is faster than typing; I used half.

With Backward, the letters disappear from the end of the line and the cursor retreats with them, which looks like someone holding the delete key. Forward removes letters from the start of the line instead, and looks like nothing a keyboard does.

One text box can type one thing. For a line that types, deletes, and types something new, stack a second text box in the same spot with its own Keyboard build in, and order them in Build Order: first box in, first box out, second box in.

On iPad and iPhone

I only tested the Mac app, so these steps are Apple’s. Tap the text box to select it, tap the menu button, then tap Animate. Tap Add Build In at the bottom of the screen and choose the effect from the list (on iPad you swipe left to see them all). Tap the build’s name at the bottom of the screen to reach its options, then tap Done.

Export the typing as a GIF

Keynote can save the animated slide as a GIF, which is useful when the typing has to live outside Keynote: in an email, a web page, or a Google Slides deck.

1. Choose File → Export To → Animated GIF…
2. Set the slide range to the one slide with the typing.
3. Pick a Size and a Frame Rate (15, 24 or 30 fps; 24 is the default).
4. The auto-advance slider sets how long Keynote waits at each build that needs a click. The default is half a second.
5. Tick Export with transparent backgrounds if you need it, then click Next and save.

For a standard 1920×1080 slide, the four sizes came out like this:

The GIF includes the cursor and loops forever. My 3-second build in plus 1.5-second build out became a 4.84-second loop of 121 frames. There is no play-once option in the dialog.

Transparency has a catch. With the theme’s white background in place, ticking the transparent option still gave me a white rectangle. It worked after I clicked an empty part of the slide, opened the Format sidebar, and changed Background to No Fill.

The export is always the whole slide, at the slide’s proportions, in one of four widths. If you need a typing GIF trimmed to the text, at an exact size such as 400×100 for an email signature, with a blinking cursor or one that plays once and stops, it’s quicker to make it in the typing text GIF maker than to bend a slide into shape.

What goes wrong

Keyboard isn’t in the list. You probably have a shape, image or chart selected. The effect list changes with the kind of object, and Keyboard is a text effect. Put the words in a text box, or type them into the shape and select that.

Nothing happens until you click. That’s the default start. Change it to After Transition in Build Order.

A long paragraph races. Duration is shared across every character. Raise it, or split the text across boxes.

The GIF has a white box around the text. The slide background is still filled. Set it to No Fill and export again.

If the deck leaves Keynote

I haven’t tested how Keyboard survives an export to PowerPoint, so don’t count on it. PowerPoint for Windows has its own letter-by-letter setting, covered in the PowerPoint typewriter guide. Google Slides has no such animation at all; the Google Slides guide shows how a typing GIF fills the gap, and the GIF you just exported from Keynote will work there too.