Chapter 8 Giving presentations

A presentation is effective when everyone in the audience learns something. With that in mind, craft your presentations with the audience in mind. If you’re using PowerPoint/Beamer/some other slide deck tool, use more pictures than words. As Dr. Melissa Marshall says, “Bullets kill” – meaning too many bullet points will kill your presentation.

8.1 Tips and ideas

• Use the title space on a slide for a short statement of the point you are making. Use the content space to add an image with a graphic or table to illustrate your point.

• Write the comments you want to make as bullet points in a sheet of speaker notes, not on the slides! You can even give the audience a copy of your speaker notes if you want them to follow along.

• Consider making your slides publicly available and linking them with a QR code to your opening slide.

• If you are including an equation or derivation, use colored text to mark the term or symbol that you want to highlight.

8.2 Tools for giving presentations

• Melissa Marshall’s resources at Present Your Science. There’s a lot here (including a TED talk) on how to use slideshows to effectively communicate to diverse audiences. 10/10, highly recommend.

• Quarto presentations - unlike Rmd files, you can knit to PowerPoint in Quarto. Also, Quarto is great for presentations where you need to show blocks of code.

• University of Iowa Beamer slides template. This template is UI specific, and the color schemes stay within the guidelines of the UI brand manual.