Troubleshooting: Unable to Open Keynote Document

We need to thank user Bill on the Apple Support Community for his advice on how to fix this issue. Also special thanks to our friend Dave for helping us find this answer several months ago.

Unable to Open “docname” because it isn’t a valid Keynote document

I wanted to repost this here because this just happened to me again and I had to look up the fix. If you’ve had this happen you know it is the most frustrating, debilitating dialog box you’ve ever seen. This fixes it every time.

1. Don’t panic.
2. Add .zip to the name of the file*
3. Double click that file
4. Open the resulting file.

*make sure you don’t just replace .key — add the .zip after that — so your file is .key.zip This also works if you didn’t have an extension at all – just add both.

[11/6/12 Editors Note: In the comments we've seen some people having issue with this not fixing the problem. The best advice I can give is to rename your file something that is letters only — no spaces or special characters and make sure you get the full extensions on there. filename.key.zip for example. We are not affiliated with Apple or Keynote and cannot provide personal tech support on this issue. This fix still seems to work 9 out of 10 times.]

[2/21/13 Editors Note: We posted this a long time ago! If the fix works for you, HOORAY! If it doesn't, that's frustrating, I'm so sorry, I've been there. Try searching help forums for the exact error in quotes—make sure to include version number and what sort of device you are on. We don't support this product, we're just people that use and love it—unfortunately we cannot provide technical support for you. As of today, we are closing the comments on this article.]

The Cobblers Finally Made their Child New Shoes!

photo credit

I’m sure you’ve heard the phrase “The Cobbler’s Children Have No Shoes”, well, that has been us for a little while now. We’ve been {ahem} too busy to rebuild our own website despite {ahem} doing that for a living. Well, the garden is harvested, we put down the Starcraft II for a minute and let the DVR save Stargate: Universe and Modern Family for us to watch later.

We are so happy to debut our new website. The new site shifts focus from what we wanted our company to be to what our company has become. We’d like to thank all of our great clients over the past few years that helped us build up a pretty awesome portfolio of our work to share.

We’d also like to thank our families and friends for supporting us as we grew our business. Also, special thanks to our friends that we have had the great fortune to work with: Kira Griffin, Amanda Nelson, Dena DeBry, Michael Carey, Karen Kaminski, Dave Wilson and Joe Turner—we look forward to many more great projects and partnerships with you guys!

We invite you to subscribe to our blog, follow us on LinkedIn, give us a call, send us a tweet or drop us a comment below.

Just a little side-by-side comparison to send this post out on:

Just Launched! Provo River Water Users Association Website

Water, water everywhere…

SAWAYA Consulting is pleased to announce the launch of the redesigned Provo River Water Users Association website—www.prwua.org

Provo River Water Users Association operates and maintains the Deer Creek Division of the Provo River Project, a Bureau of Reclamation water project vital to residents, agriculture and commerce in Utah, Salt Lake, Summit, and Wasatch Counties.

Some of the highlights of the new website:

• User Centric Design — PRWUA has two very different audiences: general public and other water agencies. Considering how each group will use the site and find information relative to them was of utmost importance.
• Communication — In addition to displaying contact information on all pages a Twitter stream and RSS feeds are integrated into the site, helping keep PRWUA connected with their users.
• Alerts — PRWUA oversees construction projects that may impact the general public, to help mitigate issues the Twitter hashtag #PRWUAalerts is used and the website automatically detects when this tag is present and dynamically inserts an icon and updates the Twitter stream heading.
• Images — PRWUA has a wealth of interesting photographs and the website was redesigned to be the best showcase possible for these. In addition to the full browser background images there are several pages that include image galleries, all images also zoom to be full-screen and display caption information with a click.
• Map Overlay Navigation — Users can visit the site and learn about different features of the Provo River Project either through text navigation or with a map overlay.
• Well Oiled Machine — Besides new and updated text content the site is fully search engine optimized and QA tested from every angle. It works smoothly in all modern browsers and is search friendly, helping people find what they need.

Visit the new website >

Special thanks to our wonderful client and everyone on their team that helped this website come together. Thank you as well to Kira Griffin (design work) and Dave Wilson (CSS, map and development help) and to Wilkinson Ferrari who referred us to PRWUA.