Creating effective slides

class: center, middle, inverse, title-slide

# Creating effective slides
### Yue Jiang
### Duke University

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### Horrible presentations

You know them when you see them

- [https://www.slideshare.net/anilkr123/car-and-technology](Example 1)
- [https://www.slideshare.net/Kshivets/lung-cancer-surgery-4936542](Example 2)

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### Software

- PowerPoint / Keynote (easy, WYSIWYG)
- LaTeX Beamer / R Markdown packages (clean, consistent, eventually straightforward)
- Random online things like Prezi (don't do this)

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### Overall to-dos

- Be direct and clear in your messaging
- Keep things simple and clean - no clutter or walls of text!
- Be consistent in design and formatting (e.g., font sizes, alignment, etc.)
- Avoid redundancy (e.g., reading directly from slides)
- Keep things readable
- Use visual interest to highlight your message

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### What to include in a presentation?

In deciding what to include per slide, try to distill your message to one main
idea (or even sentence!) per slide. So, if your presentation has ten slides, 
what are the ten most important sentences you want to get across? Are there
accompanying visuals that might help your point?

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### Software

- PowerPoint / Keynote (easy, WYSIWYG)
- LaTeX Beamer / R Markdown packages (clean, consistent, eventually straightforward)
- Random online things like Prezi (don't do this)

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### `xaringan`

`xaringan` is an R package that lets users create clean HTML5 slides directly
in R Markdown. One benefit is that you can specify your own .css files for
formatting purposes. As well, since we're using R Markdown, we can directly
run R commands, allowing us to create fully reproducible slide decks.

Documentation is available [here](https://bookdown.org/yihui/rmarkdown/xaringan.html).

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### `xaringan` examples

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### `xaringan` examples

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### `xaringan` examples

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### `xaringan` examples

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### `xaringan` examples

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### beamer

beamer is a LaTeX class that creates consistent, clean presentations. Like 
`xaringan`, it has a variety of built-in templates, but you can build your own
or specify options as well.

There are ways of integrating beamer with R in 
order to create fully reproducible presentations (e.g., Sweave), but they're a
bit tougher to get started with. You will need a LaTeX installation on your
computer and some sort of editor -- I'm partial to TeXStudio as my LaTeX editor,
but others exist as well (e.g., TeXWorks, etc.).

The GitHub repo is available [here](https://github.com/josephwright/beamer), and
some helpful tutorials are available [here](https://math-linux.com/latex-26/article/how-to-make-a-presentation-with-latex-introduction-to-beamer)
and [here](https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/LaTeX/Presentations).

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### beamer examples

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### beamer examples

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### beamer examples

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### beamer examples

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### beamer examples

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### Today's activity

.question[
Design a five-slide presentation (not including title page, references, etc.) 
for the paper explaining the GFR trial (Activity 2). Try to have a complete product
by the end of class today, and create the deck in either `xaringan` in R 
Markdown or beamer using LaTeX if you are able to.

On each page, highlight the main message your slide is trying to convey. We will
discuss the submissions at the end of class.
]