Making slide presentations

Andrew Irwin, a.irwin@dal.ca

2024-03-12

Goals

• Why do we make slides?
• Introduction to the most important tools for making slides with R

What are slides for?

• An aid to oral communication
  • Usually a small amount of text and a “display item” (figure, table, equation, code)
  • Designed to help you communicate a specific point
• Visualizations on slides differ from reports
  • Large text, bold colours, material tailored to presentation

Create a template

Rstudio menu:

• File
  • New File…
    • Quarto presentation
      • Check “RevealJS”

Documentation

• Quarto format: like regular R markdown documents, with a few variations
  • Quarto documentation
  • Full list of options and RevealJS documentation
• Demo slides and code for demo slides

Essentials

Like R markdown, but use two hashes (##) to start a slide and make a title at the top.

A heading with single hash mark makes a vertically-centred title

Use three minus signs (---) to start a new slide with no title.

Stopping distance increases with car speed

Show computer code

Use echo=TRUE.

cars |> ggplot(aes(speed, dist)) + geom_point()

Formatting text and adding images

All markdown formatting for italics, bold, hyperlinks are available.

You can include images.

A kitten

Two column format

mpg |> count(class)

class	n
2seater	5
compact	47
midsize	41
minivan	11
pickup	33
subcompact	35
suv	62

The number of observations tabulated by class of car.

Summary

• I’ve shown a simple set of slides you can easily make using Rstudio and Quarto/RevealJS (very similar to R markdown)

• Your slides should use large text and images

• Use formatting (see lesson on reproducible reports) to control how code and visualizations are displayed

• A link to the full code for these slides