Preparing a Preparing a Talk With Beamer

You will be required to give a professional talk - at time in your career. It might be a 10 or 20 minute talk at a Math Conference, or a 50 minute talk on your research in seminar at some university, or perhaps it will be a "job talk" to future colleagues at some school that is considering whether to make you an offer of employment. The best way to get ready for this event, is to do it as soon as possible. Nothing beats experience, when giving talks. For example, volunteer to give a talk in a student seminar as a grad student.

One key to giving a "good talk" is the same as for teaching - talk to your audience! Not above them, not below them, but at a level that connects with them. If it is a research seminar, this means doing your best to adjust the content of your talk to match the expectations of your audience, be it fellow grad students, or faculty in your area or research, or a room full of faculty trying to evaluate your ability to lecture as a candidate for employment. This is all about the "art of speaking". Practice makes perfect.

If you attend a Math Conference these days, you will find that perhaps almost all talks are done using a computer projector, with the "slides" having the same uniform appearance from speaker to speaker. The content will hopefully vary, but the "way it looks" can be remarkably similar. That is because the tool of choice in preparing math talks now is the TeX software package called "beamer". This evolved from the German, where the overhead projector is called a "beamer", and the software that was developed to make these slides got called the same. Whatever, it is fantastic software, and once you have made the slides for one beamer presentation, you will find preparing your next talk with beamer is incredibly straightforward. This page gives you some links and guides to making slides for a talk using the beamer software package in TeX. Of course, there is a wiki entry for beamer.

If you haven't learned LaTeX yet, go back to the first section and start learning, before continuing on!

There is one caution about giving beamer talks, which is true for any talk using an overhead projector or computer "beamer" projector. When using slides it is way too easy to put in too much material into the slides, and then when giving the talk to ignore the audience and just keep projecting the slides. These sorts of talks are incredibly painful to experience. (I once was at a talk where the fellow speaking (a senior researcher) used something like 40 detailed transparencies for a 20 minute talk. Do the math - 30 seconds per slide - Total Roadkill.) With all projector talks, it takes practice to know when to stop the slides, and reconnect with the audience. On the other hand, using beamer lets you "get your message across" better than any other method for some subjects, as you do not spend time drawing extensive diagrams or pictures on the board - these are on the slides and all the preparation is beforehand. The moral is, if you are going to give a beamer talk to a seminar or conference audience, practice the talk ahead of time, to check out the pace of delivery and amount of content you are able to cover in the talk, and keep your audience with you.

For the above reasons, it is probably not advisable to use beamer if you are giving a job talk for a Teaching Positions. The audience most likely wants to see how you perform in the classroom, and comport on a blackboard, but not how well you can click through the slides.

 

The Mechanics of Beamer

Beamer is just a particular LaTeX style file, like this one. It starts out with two lines that reveal it is a beamer file, and what the output will look like:

\documentclass{beamer}
% \usetheme{default}
% \usetheme{Boadilla}
% \usetheme{Madrid}
% \usetheme{Montpellier}
% \usetheme{Warsaw}
% \usetheme{Copenhagen}
% \usetheme{Goettingen}
% \usetheme{Hannover}
\usetheme{Berkeley}

The documentclass line says that the output produced will be in "beamer format", and the theme is "Berkeley". After these two lines, the rest of the file is standard LaTeX, with a few extra commands. To change the "theme", of which there are hundreds possible, you simply comment out one above and uncomment another line.

Click on the following links to see how each of these themes appear, with the exact same LaTeX data to follow:

Pretty amazing how the look and feel can change dramatically by simply changing the style format! And this is only a small sampling of the possible beamer styles; there are many more. Here are some, and here are some more. Or, just google the key words "Beamer Themes".

The beamer presentation for these links is silly, but was chosen to illustrate several key points, like the "\pause" function which allows you to "click through" the presentation by placing the pause command anywhere. This presentation also illustrate the inclusion of images.

That's it! if you download the source file from any of these beamer files from here, then you can use that as a basis for developing your own basic beamer presentation.

 

Beamer Tutorials

Here are some basic guides, to give an idea of the possibilities, and how to implement them. When viewing a beamer pdf file, it is often best to download it to your PC, and then view it with Adobe Reader or some other PDF Viewer, so that all the mouse features work properly.

 

Beamer Talks

Finally, another advantage of using beamer for talks, is that they are easily posted to your web site, for others to download and view. For example, the author's recent talks using beamer can all be viewed in this directory. Note that the slides with the suffix "np.pdf" are the same slides with all of the pause commands deleted. This makes it much easier to read as text files. The files with the "zip" suffix are the complete compressed directory which produced the talk in beamer format.

 

October 14, 2009 - Return to home