Beamer / Powerpoint

In response to my presentation linked to here, Ken writes, “Andrew is using the LaTeX and the beamer package to produce the presentations. Much better than Powerpoint, especially for equations and can directly include .eps from R. A good alternative to beamer is powerdot.”

I agree that beamer is great–I’ve been using it ever since Jouni told me about it, a few years ago–but it’s awkward for a presentation with lots of images, since first I have to convert each graph to .pdf, then I have to spend lots of time in trial-and-error moving and resizing the figures using the numbers inside the \includegraphics call to get the pictures in the right place. When I have a lot of pictures, I actually use Powerpoint! See here, for example. (This particular presentation actually looks cooler in “real life”: when I converted to pdf for convenient downloading, the software added a white border–which I hate, but I can’t get rid of–to each slide.)

15 thoughts on “Beamer / Powerpoint

  1. I strongly dislike beamer, or at least the way that most people use it. The default settings for beamer include a lot of clutter. Do we really need to see the presenter's name on every single slide? Do we really need to have a table of contents printed on every single slide? No. No. No. All of this clutter just becomes a type of "chartjunk" that is visually distracting, plus it reduces the available space on the slide for the content.

    Show me content, not clutter.

  2. I'd second the chart junk complaints by "K Wright". Also, Beamer has really caught on in economics, and job market candidates getting back from this recent AEA meeting are saying that everyone is using it, and that by using the same defaults, everyone's presentations look the same.

    Something to consider if distinctive presentations are important to you, as the huge library of default powerpoint templates means it is easy to archive a distinctive look.

  3. I care a lot about design, and it is no small feat to customize beamer. But I think it's worth doing. (The least one can do — use professional typefaces — is one of the trickiest things in all of latex to achieve thanks to Knuth's asinine scheme. Yes, I use Xetex sometimes.)

    Still, what other commenters call "chartjunk" may not always be. Latex and beamer, used properly, encourage users to think about document structure, and give audiences cues about the flow of the presentation. Section and subsection headings, and small progress indicators can help presenters (especially lesser-experienced ones, such as myself) stay on track. The ease of dropping in highlighted section outlines automatically makes life easier too. All of this stuff, helpful to presenters and audiences alike, would have to be done manually, even in Keynote.

    I'm 100% with Tufte on Powerpoint being evil. Beamer doesn't default to a bullet list, or by any means encourage clipart. Maybe the paucity of type is a good thing, if it leads to less Comic Sans unleashed upon the world. And I can't say how many powerpoint equation catastrophes I've seen — last I checked, "mailbox" was not an operator, nor "airplane".

    But let's consider the latex and beamer evils (Computer Modern of course leading the list). Sometimes chartjunk in default templates. Fewer templates, more difficult customization, size&pos by numbers; overuse of the same template. And the ease of adapting a [latex] paper to [latex] beamer.. no comparison.

  4. I've used beamer for an undergraduate thesis presentation. I do enjoy it, but I recall a tiny error prevented proper typesetting right before I had to speak. After that, I went out and purchased Keynote, which seams to have a nice balance of being more powerful than powerpoint, but much easier. Very little chartjunk either. I recommend it!

  5. png files also work with beamer, at least when you compile with pdflatex. Of course, png files may not be optimal for graphs…

  6. Ed

    Files in png format are fine; the real problem is that I have to do manually resizing and rescaling to get them to fit in my beamer slides. There's no drag and drop.

  7. I prefer powerdot because it has minimal clutter, except for a table of contents as a sidebar. This can be turned off or a style without can be used. I have an ambition to get beamer to look the way I want.

  8. Andrew: one thing that may help with graphics in LaTeX is to use the built-in constant scaling, rather than using widths based on units directly. Something like includegraphics[width=0.7 extwidth] works well for horizontal images like graphs; you can do something similar with extheight for vertical ones. Of course, anything other than a vector-based PDF/EPS is going to look ugly if you scale it too much.

    You may need the graphicx package for this stuff to work.

  9. I just learned Beamer yesterday, and posted some notes up at

    http://rasmusen.org/a/beamer-rasmusen.pdf

    I found it pretty easy to turn off the navigation junk that is on each slide, and the package below omits other junk. I skipped all the sectioning commands too.

    documentclass{beamer} %documentclass for beamer

    usepackage{beamerthemesplit} %Key package for beamer

    usenavigationsymbolstemplate{} %Gets rid of slide navigation symbols

  10. last year I tried to make a beamer preamble which would make slides that looked like the keynote white style. I didn't get it perfect, but it is pretty good. Here is the preamble.

  11. I am using beamer now. I'm realy feeling good with this class. it's easier to work with it than with powerpoint.
    Beamer, now, is speaking arabic! yes, it work with xepersian and bidi…

  12. To print or save powerpoint presentations as pdf without white borders, check the printer page properties and choose for the paper type: "slide".

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