Mac Powerpoint Equivalent

I have to make a presentation (like a powerpoint on a PC) on a Macbook. I am a total Macbook novice, have no idea what anything is, even the most basic things. So, can anyone tell me what the Mac equivalent of powerpoint is, how to use it, etc?? Thanks!

OpenOffice is a Mac (and PC) free package that does what the M$ stuff does. Works well - if you can use M$Office, it's pretty similar

If you have it (it doesn't come as standard) the Mac equivalent is called 'keynote' and excellent it is too. If you've ever used Powerpoint it should be fairly intuitive, but Keynote just does graphics and graphs a bit better than PPT, certainly the 2003 version.
Go to the search box in the top right hand corner of the screen, type Keynote and see what comes up. Either that or have a look in applications.

Microsoft are the biggest Mac software vendor (outside of Apple). So if you want Powerpoint, buy Microsoft Office for Mac. It's that easy, and the vast majority of Windows Office files will work on Mac Office (don't get me started on programmability though in Excel..)
The obvious alternative is Apple's iWork suite. It's around £69, which is cheaper than Microsoft's Office (which I paid around £350 for.. though if you play fast and loose with 'academic requirements' then you can get the 'Student and Teacher Edition' for £100 which does the same thing).
Out of Apple's applications, Pages (word processor) is powerful but a different paradigm to Word. Numbers (spreadsheet) looks pretty but isn't anywhere near as powerful as Excel (disclosure - Excel pays a lot of my bills). However, the presentation software, Keynote, is at least as good as Powerpoint if not better. Teh Steve uses it for all his keynotes, hence the name. It takes the fight to Microsoft - try it out.
You can get trial versions of both Microsoft's Office and Apple's iWork. Both cost money, though you can always pirate the packages (beware of trojans..) - the only sensible free office suite IIRC is OpenOffice (and the OS X prettified versions), but I can't advise on OO's presentation suite. Perhaps the Linux lads can chip in?
For my money, for presentations that don't essentially have to be PPT files (Keynote is compatible with Powerpoint but don't expect Windows users to do much with Keynote files - you'll need to export as Powerpoint to share the document), I'd use Keynote. Try it out, compare to Powerpoint, see what you think.

Dont forget the Google Docs powerpointalike. Basic, but quite effective, and finally has Speaker Notes.

Thanks everyone for the advice . There was a 30 day free trial of Keynote, and since I will only be using it over the next week for one presentation, that seemed like the best idea. It is downloading now. The presentation is about cars, and status anxiety and things, and I needed to do a narration with it, and I was taught how to do that all on a Mac at school, so I really only know how to do it that way!

As someone who works in the industry of running conferences and events, I would second Keynote as being superior to Powerpoint - problem is that most events won't have a Mac available for the presentation (I'm talking bigger events here where the AV control is handled by the technicians at the back of the room rather than a speaker plugging his own laptop into a projector at the front of the room.)
At our events, i would prefer to use Keynote... but most speakers will arrive with a memory stick with their PowerPoint presentation on, about five minutes before they are on stage (Despite being given a deadline of a week earlier to provide their presentation!)

The presentation is about.. ..status anxiety and things

Keynote is well worth getting too know - very easy to create good presentations with bugger all knowledge of such things in my experience.
Haven't tried it, but I presume the modern range of laptops can use the generic apple remote to control slides, as well as the latest version of Keynote working with an 'App' that allows remote control via iPhone across the network.
As with all presentations - less is more, resist the temptation of stuffing in too many fancy effects, concentrate on the content instead.

Keynote is superb, better graphics etc. Where it really excels is the interface for the presenter when running on two screens. Presenter screen gives all of the key information to be able to present smoothly and professionally. The company I work for use PowerPoint, and we do lots of bids for work etc. However, I use Keynote, I demonstrated it to on of the bid team this week, there were really impressed!
Tony

I use Keynote almost every day in my job.
Just the plainest of plain slides. Mainly black text on a white background (albeit with a few stylist ques) and no animation (unless it's to make a specific point).
Why?
The mac renders fonts *beautifully*, plus the editor's so much better than PowerPoint. The alignment hints help you throw something together really quickly that always seems to wind up looking good.
Plus, recording the presentation audio and sequence and dumping the lot into iMovie for editing and subsequently further dumping on the web is a really smooth workflow (although in iWork 09 they've added a VU meter that you can't seem to get rid of - looks somewhat odd when actually making the presentation to the physical audience).