Keynote to Google Slides: convert a .key file and import Keynote presentations as editable Google Slides

Can you convert Keynote to Google Slides?

Yes, but not in one step, and the missing step is the whole story. There is no button in Keynote that says Google Slides and no import in Google Slides that accepts .key. You export to PowerPoint first, then let Google convert the PowerPoint. Two products, two converters, and each was written without reference to the other.

What makes this different from the usual conversion complaint is that both vendors are being accurate. Apple documents its seven export formats correctly. Google documents its supported presentation formats correctly, and separately notes that Drive can hold a .key file so you are not wrong to see it sitting there in your Drive. Neither document is incomplete on its own terms. The gap only exists in the space between two accurate documents, which is exactly why nobody fixes it and why every guide you find is somebody guessing.

Why will Google Slides not open my .key file?

Because .key is Apple's own package format and Google never wrote an importer for it. Google's file-type documentation is precise about the distinction: .key appears in the Apple section as an editor file, alongside .numbers, which means Drive will store it and in many cases show you a preview of it. Storing and previewing are not converting. The Presentations section of the same page, the one that governs what becomes a Google Slides deck, lists the Microsoft and OpenDocument presentation formats and does not include .key.

This trips people up because the preview looks so much like success. You drop the .key into Drive, Drive renders the slides, and it is reasonable to assume Open with will offer Google Slides next. It does not. The preview is a picture of your deck, not a deck.

What actually breaks at each of the two hops

The ledger higher up this page is the part no guide publishes, because writing it requires reading both vendors' documentation and noticing what is absent from each. The short version is that the damage divides cleanly by type.

Hop one, Keynote to PowerPoint, is where motion dies. Magic Move is the transition people choose Keynote for in the first place, and PowerPoint has no equivalent that Keynote can hand it. Smart Builds and Action Builds, and the object actions that move or fade something while it travels across a slide, have nowhere to land either. Apple's export page does not mention any of this. The behaviour is described in Apple's own discussion forums by users, which is a strange place for it to live given that Apple built both ends of the export.

Hop two, PowerPoint to Google Slides, is where the rest of the motion dies and where the fonts go. Google Slides does not support motion paths or animation delays, so timing that was precise in PowerPoint is simplified or dropped, and triggers stop firing altogether. Morph, the PowerPoint transition that is closest in spirit to Magic Move, is not supported and is replaced with something basic.

Put those two together and you get the finding that makes this route worth writing about. The single most distinctive thing in a Keynote deck has to survive two independent conversions, and it is warned about in neither. If Magic Move somehow made it through hop one, hop two would delete it. It has two chances to die and no document anywhere tells you so.

Why do my fonts change when I import Keynote into Google Slides?

Because Google Slides does not read fonts embedded in an uploaded PowerPoint file. It substitutes its own instead. This is documented behaviour rather than a defect, and it is consistent enough that other vendors have written it down while trying to explain their own exports. Gamma, whose PowerPoint export deliberately embeds fonts so that the file carries its own typefaces, states that Google Slides "ignores fonts embedded in an uploaded PowerPoint file and substitutes its own" and calls it "a Google Slides limitation, not a Gamma one". That is accurate, and it is also why nothing gets fixed: each vendor is describing someone else's side.

Font substitution is never only a font problem. A substituted typeface has different character widths, so line breaks move, so a headline that fit on one line wraps onto two, so everything under it shifts down and the slide you spent an afternoon balancing is off. The deck does not look like it has a font problem. It looks like it has a layout problem, which sends people hunting in the wrong place. The same mechanism, traced end to end, is laid out in why uploaded fonts change in Google Slides.

The practical consequence for a Mac-built deck is sharper than most, because Keynote ships with a beautiful default font set that Google does not host. A deck set in an Apple system face is guaranteed to be resubstituted. If the deck has to live in Google Slides, choosing a typeface Google already hosts before you export is the single highest-value change you can make, and it is the one fix neither vendor can make for you.

How do I convert Keynote to Google Slides without losing formatting?

You reduce the damage before you export rather than repairing it after you import, because the losses are decided at the seam and Google offers no repair step. Set the deck in a font Google Slides hosts. Flatten anything that depends on Magic Move into slides that make sense as still frames, since that transition is not going to arrive. Check the file size against Google's published ceiling of 100 MB for presentations converted to Google Slides, which is easy to breach on an image-heavy or video-heavy Keynote deck and is the one failure in this whole route that announces itself with a clear error rather than a silently wrong slide.

Then run the route: File, Export To, PowerPoint in Keynote; upload the .pptx to Google Drive; Open with, Google Slides. Then read the deck slide by slide, because both converters report success either way. If PowerPoint rather than Google Slides is the real destination, the first hop is all you need and it is covered on Keynote to PowerPoint, with the step-by-step version in how to convert Keynote to PowerPoint. The second hop on its own, the part where a .pptx becomes a Google presentation, is described on PowerPoint to Google Slides and in converting PowerPoint to Google Slides.

Can I do this without a Mac?

Only partly, and this is where a lot of teams get stuck. Exporting a .key to PowerPoint requires Keynote, and Keynote requires Apple hardware or an Apple account with iCloud access. If a colleague sent you a .key and you are on Windows, you cannot perform hop one yourself. You can store the file in Drive and look at a preview of it, which is precisely the trap described above.

In practice the fix is organizational rather than technical: whoever owns the Mac does the export, or the deck is rebuilt from the source material by whoever needs it. For a consulting or finance team where one partner works on a Mac and everyone else lives in Google Workspace, that handoff repeats every single time a deck changes, and it is usually the real reason people go looking for a converter in the first place.

The deck probably started as a document

This is worth separating out, because it is where the route stops making sense. Most business presentations that end up in Keynote began as something written: a quarterly report, a client proposal, a diligence summary, a board memo. Somebody built slides from that document by hand, and you are now translating those slides into a PowerPoint file so that Google can translate them again.

Three translations, each discarding structure the original had. The heading hierarchy that defined the sections stopped existing the moment it became a layout. The table that held the numbers is a picture of a table by the time it is a slide, and a figure in a picture cannot be corrected without redrawing it. Speaker notes, where anyone wrote them, are the least valued and the first to be abandoned.

Converting the source document once produces a cleaner result than converting the slides twice, and it removes the Mac dependency entirely. That route is the same one used for PDF to Google Slides, Word to Google Slides and turning a report into a presentation, and charts built from your data explains how a table becomes a native chart object rather than a picture of one. Load your house master slides through brand templates first so the output is already on-brand, and every tier on the pricing page exports without a watermark.

Other tools with the same missing export

Keynote is not an outlier. Google Slides is a very common destination that a surprising number of presentation tools decline to export to directly, which means the two-hop route and its compounding losses show up again and again. The same wall, documented tool by tool, is covered on Canva to Google Slides, Gamma to Google Slides and NotebookLM to Google Slides, where Google's own notebook product cannot send a deck to Google's own presentation app. Teams that live in this problem daily tend to be the ones producing consulting decks and board decks, where the deck changes weekly and the audience is fixed.