Simpler beamer
Peter Smith emailed me to tell me that he has written a simpler, getting-started guide to using beamer.clsâthe LaTeX presentation programme I have raved about here. Peter’s guide is really excellent, and much less intimidating than the huge (though very informative) manual that comes with beamer. If you’ve been meaning to play with beamer, but didn’t quite know where to start, give the Simple Beamer guide a read.
It also contains a fantastic quote attributed to the philosopher Stephanie Lewis, and apparently stage-whispered during someone else’s presentation:
Power corrupts: PowerPoint corrupts absolutely.
Peter advocates making transparencies with beamer rather than showing the presentation with a data projector. I do sympathise with his reasons (the most compelling of which is that you can waste oodles of time tinkering with colour schemes and so on), but I now always make projected presentations rather than transparencies for three main reasons:
- Transparencies are actually quite expensive, and become even more costly when you manage to make a hash of printing them, or find a typo.
- I’m always altering my presentation right up until the last moment. Often, those last-minute edits improve it greatly. Yes, I should probably be more organised, but sometimes you need the adrenaline rush to think about what you really want to say.
- I almost always show at least one movie in my lectures and presentations. Movies don’t work well unless you flip the transparencies really fast.
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Thanks for the friendly recommendation for the beamer guide!
My animadversions against using a data projector were not completely serious (I'm sure I won't always follow my own advice). And I agree, transparencies are expensive (for the department, anyway); also I guess they are not very ecologically sound. But I normally make transparencies as just-in-case back-ups anyway, so aiming to use the data projector doesn't actually save resources in my case.
As for the typos ... well, speedy work with a marker for transparencies as you spot the howler mid-lecture is a lot easier than trying to edit the presentation on the fly, having tried both!
And, hey, I thought flip charts were for movies: don't tell me you can use a data projector for them too ....----- Projector presentations, are very much nicer. They tend to be far easier for your audience to read. Not to mention having higher quality output, making any graphs far clearer.
by Ryan @ 22/08/2004 8:08 pm • Permalink •
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True: typical projector presentations tend to be easier to read than typical transparencies. But IMHO that's got very little to do with the projector vs transparency issue: it's because people knock out transparencies using Mcrsft Wrd (pardon my language) without thinking enough about font size, layout, etc. A presentation program supplies layouts that promote readability. Showing the program's outputs via transparencies or via a data projector needn't make much difference if it is basically a presentation of text/maths material.
Of course I agree that if you want to show complex graphical material (not to mention movies!) then data-projected presentations are the thing.
by Peter Smith @ 23/08/2004 7:09 am • Permalink •
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as someone who used to do a LOT of presentations, i would only ever do transparencies as backup and only ever for major major events. a fixed image is just not additionally useful unless you have a beamer breakdown, and even then, very few places nowadays even have a traditional OverheadProjector anyway (outside academia)
by Saltation @ 23/08/2004 12:08 pm • Permalink •
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Peter Smith: I agree that most of the problems with presentations (of any kind) are down to the poor style choices of the person making them. Having too much text on the transparency/slide or really bad colour schemes are common mistakes. I've had my retinas seared by one too many people who think that red text on a bright green background (or some other equally vile combination) is zingy.
Ryan & Saltation: True, but the situation has changed only very recently, and since I am in academia, there are still a number of people who use overhead projectors and transparencies. I'm too much of a klutz with transparenciesâat some point while using them, I always seem to manage to knock the whole stack on the floor, or put them on upside down. If you give me a nice big target like the space bar, I manage to hit it 90% of the time!
by bsag @ 23/08/2004 5:08 pm • Permalink •
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