Presentations With Beamer

If you and your group have any questions, or get stuck as you work through this in-class exercise, please ask the instructor for assistance. Have fun!

Beamer is a LaTeX class for making presentation slides. Let’s create a new project for this activity in Overleaf.

1. Create a new project and choose the first one (Blank paper)

2. Replace the original text with the following to set up your document

   \documentclass[pdf]{beamer}
   \mode<presentation>{}
   \usetheme{Madrid}        
   % title page
   \title{Main title}
   \author{Your Name}
   \institute[UVic]
   {University of Victoria \\
   \medskip
   \textit{crystal@uvic.ca} % Your email 
   }
   \date{\today}  % it can be customized
   

This will not create a title slide just yet. For that, you need to create the document with \begin{document}, and then start a new slide with \begin{frame}. You can then tell LaTex to add a title page with \titlepage.

\begin{document}
\begin{frame}
\titlepage % Print the title page as the first slide
% remember to close the frame and the document
\end{frame}
\end{document}

1. Create your overview page and start your work:

Add a new slide after the title page that will contain the table of contents. Remember to add the piece of code below before the \end{document}

\begin{frame}
\frametitle{Overview}   % Table of contents slide, comment this block out to remove it
\tableofcontents            
\end{frame}
% You can create your structure for the Table of Contents by using     section and subsection
\section{First section}
\subsection{Subsection example}

1. Change the theme for slides:
   Find the code below \mode<presentation>{} (In the very beginning). There are other themes like \usetheme{CambridgeUS}. We will continue using the Madrid team for this exercise, but you can try out the other themes. See a list here.

2. Create the main body of the slides:
   Type the following directly before the \end{document}.

   \begin{frame}
   \frametitle{Paragraphs of Text}
   This is my first time using Beamer. 
   You can use bullet points or blocks in your slide.
   \begin{itemize}
   \item First item in a list
   \item Second item in a list 
   \item Last item in a list.
   \end{itemize}
   \begin{block}{Remark}
   Sample text
   \end{block}
   \begin{alertblock}{Important theorem}
   Sample text in red box if you wanna customize the block.
   \end{alertblock}
   \begin{examples}
   Sample text in green box. "\textbf{Examples}" is fixed as block title, 
   which means you cannot customize it.
   \end{examples}
   \end{frame}
   

   Now go back to your content pages, it has automatically updated as below.

   

3. Discover your own preferred template!
   https://goo.gl/VUn4Xq

4. If you want to know more about how to use beamer, this is a great website.

NEXT STEP: Fun with Fonts