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To use this transitions pdflatex needs to be used to create the document as a pdf file and the presentation needs to be viewed in full screen mode to observe the transitions. Adding a transition on a slide is as simple as adding a command like:

\transdissolve

to the slide. This transition disolves the contents of the slide. The LaTeX beamer user guide has further information about the transitions that are available.

Other useful resources are provided on the Supplementary Material page.

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The \pause command is the easiest way to create simple overlays that reveal consecutive parts of a slide.

\begin{itemize}
\item Total Runs Scored.
\pause
\item Number of Innings Batted.
\pause
\item Number of Not Out Innings.
\pause
\item Number of 100s.
\pause
\item Number of 50s.
\end{itemize}

Commands such as <1-> can be added after various beamer environments to allow them to appear on different slides of the overlay set to provide greater control over the display.

\begin{tabular}{cccccccc} \\ \hline
Opposition & Match & Inns & Runs & NO & Inns & Wicket & Catches \\ \hline
\onslide<2-> Australia & 36 & 49 & 1673 & 2 & 66 & 148 & 57 \\
\onslide<3-> India & 14 & 16 & 1201 & 0 & 23 & 59 & 14 \\
\onslide<4-> New Zealand & 15 & 22 & 846 & 2 & 28 & 64 & 14 \\
\onslide<5-> Pakistan & 14 & 20 & 647 & 1 & 18 & 40 & 14 \\
\onslide<6-> Sri Lanka & 3 & 3 & 41 & 0 & 6 & 11 & 2 \\
\onslide<7-> West Indies & 20 & 37 & 792 & 1 & 27 & 61 & 19 \\ \hline
\end{tabular}

The \onslide command is used to indicate a range of slides in the overlay where the information on that line should be displayed.

There are ways to create more complicated overlays to reveal information on a slide.

Other useful resources are provided on the Supplementary Material page.

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The graphicx is useful for including graphics files in a presentation and this package has a command \includegraphics where we specify the name of the image file to be included and (optionally) some formatting information such as the dimensions of the image in our document.

As an example if we wanted to include a jpg file then we would include a command like this:

\includegraphics{plot}

and if we wanted to scale in the horizontal or vertical dimension then we can specify the height and width to use:

\includegraphics[height=8cm,width=12cm]{plot}

There are other options as part of the graphicx package that can be used to adjust the display of the image as required.

Other useful resources are provided on the Supplementary Material page.

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The examples on this page have been inspired by the good examples on global nodes detailed on texample.net. The example can be adapted to apply to equations for various statistical models and we will consider the model for a general row-column experiment design.

To create this example we need to make tikz available in our tex file by adding the following code to the preamble:

\usepackage{tikz}
\usetikzlibrary{arrows,shapes}

The second and third lines refer to particular elements of tikz that will be used in the example.

If we want to access nodes in different areas of our latex document we need to make use of the remember picture style and the easiest way to do this is to make a global declaration rather than on each specific picture:

\tikzstyle{every picture}+=[remember picture]

The example will be the model for a row-column experiment design and we will have four elements in a bullet list that are linked by arrows to different parts of the equation, which in turn are highlighted in their own box.

We use the itemize environment to add the first bullet point:

\begin{itemize}
\item Overall mean \tikz[na] \node[coordinate] (s1) {};
\end{itemize}

At the end of the item we add a tikz node so that we can draw a line from the end of this line to one of the boxes in the equation. We also provide a name s1 so that it can be identified by tikz. This node uses a style to shift the location where the line starts from, that we need to define in our document using this code:

\tikzstyle{na} = [baseline=-.5ex]

The next step is to create the equation and the nodes and background boxes for each element of the equation that will be linked to the bullet list. The code for the equation is shown here:

\begin{equation}
y_{ijk} = \tikz[baseline]{ \node[fill=blue!20,anchor=base,rounded corners=2pt]
  (d1) {$\mu$}; }
+ \tikz[baseline]{ \node[fill=red!20,anchor=base,rounded corners=2pt]
  (d2) {$r_{i}$}; }
+ \tikz[baseline]{ \node[fill=green!20,anchor=base,rounded corners=2pt]
  (d3) {$c_{j}$}; }
+ \tikz[baseline]{ \node[fill=yellow!20,anchor=base,rounded corners=2pt]
  (d4) {$t_{k}$}; }
+ \epsilon_{ijk}
\end{equation}

If we look closely at this code the latex for the equation itself is very straightforward and the complication comes from adding a tikz node to four of the elements of the equation. The nodes themselves have colours (blue/red/green/yellow) and rounded corners. They each have a label d1 to d4 so that tikz can draw lines between the bullet list and the elements of the equation.

We then finish off the bullet list with three more elements:

\begin{itemize}
\item Effect of row $i$ \tikz[na] \node[coordinate] (s2) {};
\item Effect of column $j$ \tikz[na] \node[coordinate] (s3) {};
\item Effect of treatment $k$ \tikz[na] \node[coordinate] (s4) {};
\end{itemize}

Each of the items in this bullet list have their own identifier s2 to s4 that we will use to draw arrows.

We create a separate picture environment for the four arrows linking the bullet list to the equation. Each element is defined as a path between two nodes with additional information about the shape of the arrow.

\begin{tikzpicture}[overlay]
\path[->] (s1) edge [bend left] (d1);
\path[->] (s2) edge [bend right] (d2);
\path[->] (s3) edge [out=0, in=-90] (d3);
\path[->] (s4) edge [out=0, in=-90] (d4);
\end{tikzpicture}

There are many variants on this example that could be incorporated in a presentation.

Other useful resources are provided on the Supplementary Material page. Also head over to texample.net for more examples of using the tikz package.

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The easiest way to create a box is to use the various pre-defined environments such as definition:

\begin{definition}
The simple linear regression model describes the relationship between
a response variable and a single explanatory variable.
\end{definition}

We might want to create a box with our own title in which case the exampleblock environment can be used with the new title as an argument to this environment:

\begin{exampleblock}{Linear Regression Model}
$Y_{i} = \beta_{0} + \beta_{1} X_{i} + \epsilon_{i}$
\end{exampleblock}

Other useful resources are provided on the Supplementary Material page.

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For example, if we wanted to add a table of some of the common geom elements for ggplot2 to a slide we could use the following code:

\begin{frame}{Common geoms}
 
\begin{tabular}{cc}
geom & Description \\ \hline
geom_bar & Bar chart \\
geom_boxplot & Box and Whisker plot \\
geom_contour & Contour plot \\
geom_point & Scatter plot \\
geom_smooth & Smoothed conditional mean \\
\end{tabular}
 
\end{frame}

This is a basic example of creating a table and there are many examples of how the appearance of a table can be enhanced in LaTeX, see for example here or here.

Other useful resources are provided on the Supplementary Material page.

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The bullet lists can be created using the itemize or enumerate environments depending on the type of list that we want to appear on the slides. The itemize list uses symbols and is not numbered while the enumerate list is a numbered list so the choice will depend on the elements covered by the list.

Within our slide we would create the list environment in exactly the same was as over LaTeX documents and the \item command. An example of creating a bullet list of assumptions for a linear statistical model is shown here:

\begin{itemize}
\item A linear the relationship between response and explanatory variables.
\item Independence of the model errors.
\item Constant variance for the model errors (a) versus time and (b) versus
  the predictions (or versus any independent variable)
\item Normality of the errors.
\end{itemize}

This can be easily changed to an enumerate environment to make it a numbered list.

Other useful resources are provided on the Supplementary Material page.

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To create a slide we make use of the frame environment and the first argument is the title for the slide, which usually appears at the top of the slide. For example a basic slide with a title and a sentence of body text would be created with the following commands:

\begin{frame}{Introduction}
This presentation covers the theory behind the linear regression model.
\end{frame}

The text in a slide may look plain and if we wanted to highlight a particular word(s) then there are various options for doing this. The \emph is used to provide emphasis that is usually indicated by an italic font. The \alert command highlights a word in a colour, often red, to make it stand out from the rest of the text. There are other options that can be used to change for example the colour of the text or other features of the font.

Other useful resources are provided on the Supplementary Material page.

Title Pages

In a previous post we considered creating a title page for a presentation which follows the same general approach to creating titles in other LaTeX document types.

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An example of the commands needed to create the title of a presentation are shown below, where the square brackets are used to indicate the short information that is used in places like the running headers of a document:

\title[ggplot2 Tutorial]{An Introduction to the ggplot2 package}
\subtitle[GM-RAM]{http://www.wekaleamstudios.co.uk}
\author[GM-RAM]{GM-RAM Technical Staff}

Then we need to create a frame in the document to display the title page via the frame environment:

\begin{frame}
\titlepage
\end{frame}

Document Structure

Most LaTeX documents make use of the sectioning commands to create a logical structure to the contents of a document. Headings can be defined at various levels starting from chapter moving down to sections then subsections.

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These sections commands can be used in beamer and behave slightly differently to other document classes and the display of the section headings depends on the theme and the use of tables of contents which can be interspaced around the presentation, for example appearing at the start of each section to remind the audience of progress through the presentation.

The sections are defined in the same way as with other LaTeX documents:

\section{Introduction}
 
\section{Basic Graphs}

Table of Contents

It is a simple task to add a slide with the table of contents to a presentation using the following commands:

\begin{frame}
\frametitle{Outline}
\tableofcontents[currentsection]
\end{frame}

We can specify a title for the slide with the table of contents using the \frametitle command.

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We can generate a recurring table of contents at the start of each section with the \AtBeginSection command like this:

\AtBeginSection[]
{
\begin{frame}
\frametitle{Outline}
\tableofcontents[currentsection]
\end{frame}
}

Other useful resources are provided on the Supplementary Material page.

The presentation itself can be divided into sections using the normal LaTeX commands like \section or \subsection etc. With the default theme this is not so obvious, but when we make use of other themes then the section can be display in the header and/or using slides to introduce each section of the presentation.

In many presentations different parts of the slide will be revealed one at a time. The simplest way to make use of this in beamer is using the \pause command. For example,

Given a response variable Y and an explanatory variable X, the
formula for the model based on these two variables is:
\pause
\begin{equation}
Y_{i} = \beta_{0} + \beta_{1} X_{i} + \epsilon_{i}
\end{equation}
\pause
and we assume that the $\epsilon_{i}$ are independent random
variables.

would produce three slides in our pdf document. Flicking through these three slides gives the illusion of the material being uncovered. If you are using the list environment then the \item command can be altered to indicate what slides the element should appear on. For example, \item<2-> requests that the item appears on the second and all subsequent slides. If this was changed to \item<2-3> then the item would stay for the third slide but none of the subsequent slides.

The verbatim package and environment is useful but to make use of it we need to invoke the fragile option when creating our slide. For example,

\begin{frame}[fragile]{Linear Regression Model}
\end{frame}

Another useful environment is the block environment which creates a box in which some material is presented and has a title. So we could put our verbatim text of a function inside a block environment with the following code:

\begin{block}{Function Code}
\begin{verbatim}
int addTwo(int x, int y)
{
    int result;
    result = x + y;
    return (result);
}
\end{verbatim}
\end{block}

This would produce the following document and the lack of theme means that the arrangement is not so obvious. The themes change colours and other attributes which can be used to make parts of the presentation stand out.