PowerPoint has been iterated over the years to be more or less a document publishing app that happens to go full-screen. It has support for lots of embeddings (

PowerPoint has been iterated over the years to be more or less a document publishing app that happens to go full-screen. It has support for lots of embeddings (like Excel), and can help turn especially heavy chunks of text into something slightly more digestible – Smart Art is good at this, in fact. Conversely, Keynote was and remains an app designed for visually heavy presentations, so it optimises a lot more for aesthetics: gradients, blends, transparency, (sadly still no blur wtf), animation of items on a slide, very complex animated reveal and build, complicated slide transitions, etc. It has also UX optimised for visually precise layout (in areas PowerPoint is frankly unhelpful). If you just want to make people look at pages after page of charts and graphs that should have been memos, PowerPoint is good and possibly stronger. If you want to make an aesthetically compelling visual presentation, Keynote will get you there for less effort.