making presentations in r

Slide Presentations

R Markdown renders to four presentation formats:

• beamer_presentation - PDF presentations with beamer
• ioslides_presentation - HTML presentations with ioslides
• slidy_presentation - HTML presentations with slidy
• powerpoint_presentation - PowerPoint presentation
• revealjs::revealjs_presentation - HTML presentations with reveal.js

Each format will intuitively divide your content into slides, with a new slide beginning at each first or second level header.

Insert a horizontal rule ( *** ) into your document to create a manual slide break. Create incremental bullets with >- , as in the .Rmd file below, which is available here on RStudio Cloud.

Continue to Dashboards

How To Make A PowerPoint Presentation Using R Markdown

PowerPoint is the most recognized presentation-making software, but it isn’t for everyone. Some may find it packed with unnecessary features, and to some extent that's true. Microsoft updates it regularly and invents things you never even knew you needed. If you’re a programmer at heart, you likely value simplicity. That’s where this article comes in. We’ll ditch PowerPoint and make presentations in a way you didn’t know was possible. After reading, you’ll know how to make an entire editable PowerPoint presentation using only R Markdown. <blockquote><strong>Interested in a real-world use case? <a href="https://appsilon.com/gxp-compliance-in-pharma-made-easier-good-documentation-practices-with-r-markdown-and-officedown/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Here’s how we applied R Markdown in Pharma</a>.</strong></blockquote> Table of contents: <ul><li><a href="#getting-started">Getting Started</a></li><li><a href="#basics">What Can You Do With Markdown?</a></li><li><a href="#advanced">Images, Tables, and Custom Layout</a></li><li><a href="#style">How to Style Your R Markdown Presentation</a></li><li><a href="#conclusion">Conclusion</a></li></ul> <hr /> <h2 id="getting-started">R Markdown PowerPoint Presentation - Getting Started</h2> We assume you have R and RStudio installed. Once in RStudio, go to <em>File</em> - <em>New File</em> - <em>R Markdown</em>. A window like the one below should appear: <img class="size-full wp-image-12097" src="https://webflow-prod-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/6525256482c9e9a06c7a9d3c%2F65b01ee7832c47d67312b3e1_creating-new-r-markdown-powerpoint-presentaiton.webp" alt="Image 1 - Creating a new R Markdown PowerPoint Presentation" width="2564" height="1758" /> Image 1 - Creating a new R Markdown PowerPoint Presentation Give your presentation a title and optionally specify the author. Also, make sure to select <em>PowerPoint</em> as the default output format. R will ask you to install a couple of dependencies if this is your first time working with R Markdown. After clicking on OK you’ll see a default R Markdown PowerPoint presentation code: <img class="size-full wp-image-12099" src="https://webflow-prod-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/6525256482c9e9a06c7a9d3c%2F65b01ee892a26c843b62e764_Default-presentation-template.webp" alt="Image 2 - Default presentation template" width="2564" height="1758" /> Image 2 - Default presentation template That’s great, but how can you “compile” it? Well, easily! Click on the <strong>Knit dropdown</strong> and choose the <em>Knit to PowerPoint</em> option: <img class="size-full wp-image-12107" src="https://webflow-prod-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/6525256482c9e9a06c7a9d3c%2F65b01eea48b83fcd2e55b400_How-to-run-R-Markdown-PowerPoint-presentation.webp" alt="Image 3 - How to run R Markdown PowerPoint presentation" width="2564" height="1758" /> Image 3 - How to run R Markdown PowerPoint presentation That’s it! A PowerPoint presentation will be knitted and opened after a couple of seconds. Here’s what it looks like: <img class="size-full wp-image-12105" src="https://webflow-prod-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/6525256482c9e9a06c7a9d3c%2F65b01eea2a228de4b21e9ac2_First-rendered-presentation.gif" alt="Image 4 - First rendered presentation" width="1314" height="898" /> Image 4 - First rendered presentation It’s a strong start but definitely needs work. I'll show you how to spice it up in the sections below. First, we’ll explore what can you actually do with Markdown. <h2 id="basics">What Can You Do With Markdown?</h2> Markdown is a free-to-use markup language used to format plain text. It’s popular among developers and technical writers because it provides you with everything you need and nothing else. We’ll now explore what can you do with R Markdown, and how you can do it. You’ll learn how to: <ul><li><strong>Style the text</strong> - Use italics, bold, strikeout, subscript, superscript, small caps, and verbatim.</li><li><strong>Lists</strong> - Ordered and unordered.</li><li><strong>Links</strong> - Embed URLs to external websites.</li><li><strong>Quotes</strong> - Special indentation for your text.</li><li><strong>Equations</strong> - Does LaTeX ring a bell? You can use it in Markdown.</li></ul> We’ll also cover more advanced Markdown functionality, but these are enough for one section. Use the following code to declare two slides with all mentioned Markdown functionalities: <script src="https://gist.github.com/darioappsilon/b2da95cfb87db52c2a49ba4ea3bb150a.js"></script> Your R Markdown file should look like this: <img class="size-full wp-image-12103" src="https://webflow-prod-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/6525256482c9e9a06c7a9d3c%2F65b01eeb6bb6e6a6629bfa2b_Exploring-Markdown-options.webp" alt="Image 5 - Exploring Markdown options" width="2564" height="1758" /> Image 5 - Exploring Markdown options And once again, use <em>Knit to PowerPoint</em> option to export the PPTX: <img class="size-full wp-image-12109" src="https://webflow-prod-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/6525256482c9e9a06c7a9d3c%2F65b01eec9506383404c4ec25_Rendered-markdown-presentation.gif" alt="Image 6 - Rendered markdown presentation" width="1314" height="898" /> Image 6 - Rendered markdown presentation The R Markdown PowerPoint presentation still looks rough around the edges, but we’ll address the visuals soon. Before we do that, let’s go over a couple of “advanced” Markdown elements, and how to get the most out of them. <blockquote><strong>Want to include your Bar Plots in your presentation? Follow these <a href="https://appsilon.com/data-visualization-best-practices-bar-plots/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Data Visualization Best Practices</a>.</strong></blockquote> <h2 id="advanced">Adding Images, Tables, and Custom Layouts to an R Markdown PowerPoint Presentation</h2> A presentation without images and tables is, well, boring. Also, most presentations make use of multiple layouts. For example, there are scenarios where a two-column layout is preferred. You’ll learn how to use it in this section. The code snippet below implements the following: <ul><li><strong>1st Slide</strong> - Loads a dog image from <a href="https://unsplash.com/photos/UinXDJCcqeY" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Unsplash</a> and adds a caption to it.</li><li><strong>2nd Slide</strong> - Shows a table representing a subset from the <a href="https://gist.github.com/netj/8836201" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Iris dataset</a>.</li><li><strong>3rd Slide</strong> - Implements a two-column layout.</li></ul> <script src="https://gist.github.com/darioappsilon/37a7b72b33753d95fa4553f0c968dd98.js"></script> This time, you won’t see any rendered output in the R Markdown file: <img class="size-full wp-image-12095" src="https://webflow-prod-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/6525256482c9e9a06c7a9d3c%2F65b01eed00b05468d71b8f4e_Adding-images-tables-and-custom-layouts.webp" alt="Image 7 - Adding images, tables, and custom layouts" width="2564" height="1758" /> Image 7 - Adding images, tables, and custom layouts Here’s what the final PPTX looks like: <img class="size-full wp-image-12111" src="https://webflow-prod-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/6525256482c9e9a06c7a9d3c%2F65b01eefe6755ca41b304f53_Rendered-Powerpoint-presentation.gif" alt="Image 8 - Rendered Powerpoint presentation" width="1314" height="898" /> Image 8 - Rendered Powerpoint presentation You now know the basics of R Markdown - just enough to place any type of content into your R Markdown PowerPoint presentations. But how can you make the slideshow visually appealing? That’s what we’ll explore next. <h2 id="style">How to Style Your R Markdown PowerPoint Presentation</h2> The default PPTX layout is, well, default, and doesn’t look attractive at all. To change it, you’ll first have to create a blank PowerPoint presentation and open the Slide Master (<em>View - Slide Master</em>). Once inside, tweak it as you normally would when styling a PPTX file. <blockquote><strong>Excel is good, but not great. Check out our <a href="https://appsilon.com/excel-is-obsolete-here-are-the-top-2-alternatives-from-r-and-python/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">top alternatives from R and Python</a>. </strong></blockquote> We’ll only change the theme, just to keep things simple: <img class="size-full wp-image-12101" src="https://webflow-prod-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/6525256482c9e9a06c7a9d3c%2F65b01ef20a2ba062e1ba27da_Editing-the-slide-master.webp" alt="Image 9 - Editing the slide master" width="3100" height="2024" /> Image 9 - Editing the slide master You’re free to take your time here and add custom graphics, fonts, and other visual elements. Once done, <strong>save the PPTX file right where your .Rmd file is</strong>: <img class="size-full wp-image-12115" src="https://webflow-prod-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/6525256482c9e9a06c7a9d3c%2F65b01ef40fc7bbb4c493e2d2_Saving-PowerPoint-template.webp" alt="Image 10 - Saving PowerPoint template" width="3424" height="2024" /> Image 10 - Saving PowerPoint template You can save it elsewhere, but it’s a good practice to keep the PowerPoint template and R Markdown file in the same directory. To use the template, you’ll only have to modify the header of the R Markdown file: <script src="https://gist.github.com/darioappsilon/f1b601dd3efaf3faa2e21ea06cf9c475.js"></script> That’s why we saved the PPTX template in the same directory. There’s no need to think about the path. Everything else in the Rmd file remains the same. Knit the PowerPoint presentation to verify the template was used: <img class="size-full wp-image-12113" src="https://webflow-prod-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/6525256482c9e9a06c7a9d3c%2F65b01ef4385c8d506b9c0ed3_Rendered-presentation-with-a-custom-template.gif" alt="Image 11 - Rendered presentation with a custom template" width="1314" height="898" /> Image 11 - Rendered presentation with a custom template And would you look at that - a custom PowerPoint template was successfully applied to our R Markdown PowerPoint presentation. We won’t dive into more advanced use cases today, as this alone is enough to cover what most programmers and tech users need. But if you'd like to learn about more advanced uses, let us know. <h2 id="conclusion">Conclusion</h2> PowerPoint isn’t for everyone, just like MS Word. If you know Markdown, you can write and edit text documents much faster than in a traditional word processor. What makes things even better is its shareability, as most online writing platforms understand Markdown. R Markdown is by no means a replacement for dedicated office suites, so keep that in mind. It might be a decent alternative if you need to automate slide production, simply don’t want to use PowerPoint, or if you don’t need all the functionalities it offers. To further drive the point home, we recommend the following homework tasks: <ul><li>Try to embed a YouTube video or a GIF. Is there any difference from regular images?</li><li>Add presenter notes to one or more slides.</li><li>Try to add animations between slides. Is it possible?</li></ul> Feel free to share results with us on Twitter – <a href="https://twitter.com/appsilon" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">@appsilon</a>. We’d love to see what you come up with. <blockquote><strong>R isn’t limited to Markdown only. <a href="https://appsilon.com/best-r-shiny-books-and-courses/" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Here are the top free resources if you want to learn R Shiny</a>.</strong></blockquote>

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8   Slideshow Presentations

You are reading the free online version of this book. if you’d like to purchase a physical or electronic copy, you can buy it from no starch press , powell’s , barnes and noble or amazon ..

If you need to create a slideshow presentation, like one you might create in PowerPoint, R has you covered. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to produce presentations using xaringan . This package, which uses R Markdown, is the most widely used tool for creating slideshows in R.

You’ll use xaringan to turn the penguin report from Chapter 6 into a slideshow. You’ll learn how to create new slides, selectively reveal content, adjust text and image alignment, and style your presentation with CSS.

Why Use xaringan?

You might have noticed the Presentation option while creating a new R Markdown document in RStudio. This option offers several ways to make slides, such as knitting an R Markdown document to PowerPoint. However, using the xaringan package provides advantages over these options.

For example, because xaringan creates slides as HTML documents, you can post them online versus having to email them or print them out for viewers. You can send someone the presentation simply by sharing a link. Chapter 9 will discuss ways to publish your presentations online.

A second benefit of using xaringan is accessibility. HTML documents are easy to manipulate, giving viewers control over their appearance. For example, people with limited vision can access HTML documents in ways that allow them to view the content, such as by increasing the text size or using screen readers. Making presentations with xaringan lets more people engage with your slides.

How xaringan Works

To get started with xaringan , run install.packages("xaringan") in RStudio to install the package. Next, navigate to File > New File > R Markdown to create a new project. Choose the From Template tab and select the template called Ninja Presentation , then click OK .

You should get an R Markdown document containing some default content. Delete this and add the penguin R report you created in Chapter 6 . Then, change the output format in the YAML to xaringan::moon_reader like so:

The moon_reader output format takes R Markdown documents and knits them as slides. Try clicking Knit to see what this looks like. You should get an HTML file with the same name as the R Markdown document (such as xaringan-example.html ), as shown in Figure  8.1 .

If you scroll to the next slide with the right arrow key, you should see familiar content. Figure  8.2 shows the second slide, which has the same text as the report from Chapter 6 and a cut-off version of its histogram.

Although the syntax for making slides with xaringan is nearly identical to that used to make reports with R Markdown, you need to make a few tweaks so that the content can fit on the slides. When you’re working in a document that will be knitted to Word, its length doesn’t matter, because reports can have 1 page or 100 pages. Working with xaringan , however, requires you to consider how much content can fit on a single slide. The cut-off histogram demonstrates what happens if you don’t. You’ll fix it next.

Creating a New Slide

You’ll make this histogram fully visible by putting it in its own slide. To make a new slide, add three dashes ( --- ) where you’d like it to begin. I’ve added them before the histogram code:

When you knit the document again, what was one slide should now be broken into two: an Introduction slide and a Bill Length slide. However, if you look closely, you’ll notice that the bottom of the histogram is still slightly cut off. To correct this, you’ll change its size.

Adjusting the Size of Figures

Adjust the size of the histogram using the code chunk option fig.height :

Doing this fits the histogram fully on the slide and also reveals the text that was hidden below it. Keep in mind that fig.height adjusts only the figure’s output height; sometimes you may need to adjust the output width using fig.width in addition or instead.

Revealing Content Incrementally

When presenting a slideshow, you might want to show only a portion of the content on each slide at a time. Say, for example, that when you’re presenting the first slide, you want to talk a bit about each penguin species. Rather than show all three species when you open this slide, you might prefer to have the names come up one at a time.

You can do this using a feature xaringan calls incremental reveal . Place two dashes (–) between any content you want to display incrementally, like so:

This code lets you show Adelie onscreen first; then Adelie and Gentoo; and then Adelie, Gentoo, and Chinstrap. When presenting your slides, use the right arrow to incrementally reveal the species.

Aligning Content with Content Classes

You’ll also likely want to control how your content is aligned. To do so, you add the content classes .left[] , right[] , and center[] to specify the desired alignment for a piece of content. For example, to center-align the histogram, use .center[] as follows:

This code centers the chart on the slide.

Other built-in options can make two-column layouts. Adding .pull-left[] and .pull-right[] will make two equally spaced columns. Use the following code to display the histogram on the left side of the slide and the accompanying text on the right:

Figure  8.3 shows the result.

To make a narrow left column and wide right column, use the content classes .left-column[] and .right-column[]. Figure  8.4 shows what the slide looks like with the text on the left and the histogram on the right.

In addition to aligning particular pieces of content on slides, you can also horizontally align the entire content using the left , right , and center classes. To do so, specify the class right after the three dashes that indicate a new slide, but before any content:

This code produces a horizontally centered slide. To adjust the vertical position, you can use the classes top , middle , and bottom .

Adding Background Images to Slides

Using the same syntax you just used to center the entire slide, you can also add a background image. Create a new slide, use the classes center and middle to horizontally and vertically align the content, and add a background image by specifying the path to the image within the parentheses of url() :

To run this code, you’ll need a file called penguins.jpg in your project (you can download it at https://data.rfortherestofus.com/penguins.jpg ). Knitting the document should produce a slide that uses this image as a background with the text Penguins in front of it, as shown in Figure  8.5 .

Now you’ll add custom CSS to further improve this slide.

Applying CSS to Slides

One issue with the slide you just made is that the word Penguins is hard to read. It would be better if you could make the text bigger and a different color. To do this, you’ll need to use Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) , the language used to style HTML documents. If you’re thinking, I’m reading this book to learn R, not CSS , don’t worry: you’ll need only a bit of CSS to make tweaks to your slides. To apply them, you can write your own custom code, use a CSS theme, or combine the two approaches using the xaringanthemer package.

To add custom CSS, create a new code chunk and place css between the curly brackets:

This code chunk tells R Markdown to make the second-level header ( h2 ) 150 pixels large and white. Adding .remark-slide-content before the header targets specific elements in the presentation. The term remark comes from remark.js , a JavaScript library for making presentations that xaringan uses under the hood.

To change the font in addition to the text’s size and color, add this CSS:

The first new line makes a font called Inter available to the slides, because some people might not have the font installed on their computers. Next, this code applies Inter to the header and makes it bold. You can see the slide with bold Inter font in Figure  8.6 .

Because xaringan slides are built as HTML documents, you can customize them with CSS however you’d like. The sky’s the limit!

You may not care to know the ins and outs of CSS. Fortunately, you can customize your slides in two ways without writing any CSS yourself. The first way is to apply xaringan themes created by other R users. Run this code to get a list of all available themes:

The output should look something like this:

Some CSS files change fonts only, while others change general elements, such as text size, colors, and whether slide numbers are displayed. Using prebuilt themes usually requires you to use both a general theme and a fonts theme, as follows:

This code tells xaringan to use the default CSS, as well as customizations made in the metropolis and metropolis-fonts CSS themes. These come bundled with xaringan , so you don’t need to install any additional packages to access them. Figure  8.7 shows how the theme changes the look and feel of the slides.

If writing custom CSS is the totally flexible but more challenging option for tweaking your xaringan slides, then using a custom theme is simpler but a lot less flexible. Custom themes allow you to easily use others’ prebuilt CSS but not to tweak it further.

The xaringanthemer Package

A nice middle ground between writing custom CSS and applying someone else’s theme is to use the xaringanthemer package by Garrick Aden-Buie. This package includes several built-in themes but also allows you to easily create your own custom theme. After installing the package, adjust the css line in your YAML to use the xaringan-themer.css file like so:

Now you can customize your slides by using the style_xaringan() function. This function has over 60 arguments, enabling you to tweak nearly any part of your xaringan slides. To replicate the custom CSS you wrote earlier in this chapter using xaringanthemer , you’ll use just a few of the arguments:

This code sets the header size to 150 pixels and makes all the headers use the bold, white Inter font.

One particularly nice thing about the xaringanthemer package is that you can use any font available on Google Fonts by simply adding its name to header_font_family or another argument that sets font families ( text_font_family and code_font_family are the other two, for styling body text and code, respectively). This means you won’t have to include the line that makes the Inter font available.

In this chapter, you learned how to create presentations using the xaringan package. You saw how to incrementally reveal content on slides, create multi-column layouts, and add background images to slides. You also changed your slides’ appearance by applying custom themes, writing your own CSS, and using the xaringanthemer package.

With xaringan , you can create any type of presentation you want and then customize it to match your desired look and feel. Creating presentations with xaringan also allows you to share your HTML slides easily and enables greater accessibility.

Additional Resources

Garrick Aden-Buie and Silvia Canelón, “Professional, Polished, Presentable: Making Great Slides with xaringan,” workshop materials, n.d., https://presentable-user2021.netlify.app .

Silvia Canelón, “Sharing Your Work with xaringan: An Introduction to xaringan for Presentations: The Basics and Beyond,” workshop for the NHS-R Community 2020 Virtual Conference, November 2, 2020, https://spcanelon.github.io/xaringan-basics-and-beyond/index.html .

Alison Hill, “Meet xaringan: Making Slides in R Markdown,” slideshow presentation, January 16, 2019, https://arm.rbind.io/slides/xaringan.html .

Yihui Xie, J. J. Allaire, and Garrett Grolemund, “xaringan Presentations,” in R Markdown: The Definitive Guide (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2019), https://bookdown.org/yihui/rmarkdown/ .

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Creating a presentation with r.

Posted on June 20, 2015 by spatialRecology - r in R bloggers | 0 Comments

[social4i size="small" align="align-left"] --> [This article was first published on spatialRecology - r , and kindly contributed to R-bloggers ]. (You can report issue about the content on this page here ) Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't.

1. Install and Initialize

2.1 add slide content, 2.1 change the look and feel, 2.1 collection of links, 3. generate and publish.

As a LaTeX fan, I started early to write my presentations with the Beamer document class. Unfortunately, the default classes are starting to look rather antique today and lack the possibility to implement a lot of cool stuff, like maps from leaflet and other applications. This is why the search for something different began.

The first alternative I stumbled upon was io2012 slides , an HTML/JavaScript framework for Google I/O 2012. As you may have heard, it’s kind of awesome. Another framework that deserves recognition is definitely reveal.js , which has a solid balance between looking sleek but also very modern. While they look like nice solutions they also require decent web development skills to take advantage of them.

R offers two packages to create presentations with HTML/JavaScript frameworks without actually knowing anything about Java or HTML. There is the package slidify from Ramnath Vaidyanathan and there is R presentation , a feature of RStudio . They both function as a wrapper of several libraries which allows you to go from simple R Markdown to HTML presentations.

I decided to go with slidify because it looked more customizable and offered more JavaScript frameworks. During the first “experimentations” the look of the io2012 slides felt quite comfortable to me and so R presentation was no option. If this has changed in the meantime, please e-mail me with your experience or post something in the discussion.

It seems that slidify is becoming a “thing” now, which is why I will restrict myself to show just the basics of the package and refer to some useful links.

But first have a look at an example by frederickf :

As stated out by Ramnath, the author of the package, slidify is still under heavy development. Therefore, we have to install it from github using the devtools package :

After installing and loading slidify you can run:

The code between the two sets of three dashes is the YAML front matter (a recursive acronym that stands for “YAML Ain’t Markup Language”), which is used to control the underlying layout and initialize the presentation.

The deck can be shared using GitHub, Dropbox or RPubs directly from R.

2. Author and Edit

As I pointed out, here just some basics on how to control slidify :

With three dashes we can separate slides. Content can be written in Markdown or plain HTML. R Code can be implemented like this:

• Markdown CheatSheet from Rstudio

To change the look and feel of your presentation the options framework , highlighter and hitheme must be changed. For each of them a variety of options are available:

• http://slidify.github.io/workshops/tutorials/02/#1
• https://highlightjs.org/static/demo/

A short summary of all of this is shown in Ramnaths video about slidify :

• Get Started
• Tutorial on the slide layout
• Tutorial on widgets in slidify
• Creating elegant HTML presentations that feature R code (using slidify)
• Fantastic presentations from R using slidify and rCharts
• Slidify: Modern, simple presentations written in R Markdown

To generate a static HTML file containing the presentation we can just use:

… and have a look with:

Github and Dropbox can be accessed with:

It looks great. It plays nice with shiny and rCharts . It can easily be published on github. There’s a tonne of cool things slidify can do and I am sure I haven’t discovered all of them.

Printing to PDF is a challenge, but I have not checked all options yet (like pandoc for example) This is probably the only downside I came across with during the making of my first HTML presentation.

Overall, the combination of Markdown and slidify can create a nice set of slides in a short amount of time. The coding with slidify is very straightforward and feels fresh after using Beamer for a long time. If you use R frequently, slidify helps by bringing together reproducible analysis and a nice presentation of your results.

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R Markdown: The Definitive Guide

4.1 ioslides presentation.

To create an ioslides presentation from R Markdown, you specify the ioslides_presentation output format in the YAML metadata of your document. You can create a slide show broken up into sections by using the # and ## heading tags (you can also create a new slide without a header using a horizontal rule ( --- ). For example here is a simple slide show (see Figure 4.1 for two sample slides):

FIGURE 4.1: Two sample slides in an ioslides presentation.

You can add a subtitle to a slide or section by including text after the pipe ( | ) character. For example:

4.1.1 Display modes

The following single character keyboard shortcuts enable alternate display modes:

'f' : enable fullscreen mode

'w' : toggle widescreen mode

'o' : enable overview mode

'h' : enable code highlight mode

'p' : show presenter notes

Pressing Esc exits all of these modes. See the sections below on Code Highlighting and Presenter Mode for additional detail on those modes.

4.1.2 Incremental bullets

You can render bullets incrementally by adding the incremental option:

If you want to render bullets incrementally for some slides but not others you can (ab)use this syntax for blockquotes:

4.1.3 Visual appearance

4.1.3.1 presentation size.

You can display the presentation using a wider form factor using the widescreen option. You can specify that smaller text be used with the smaller option. For example:

You can also enable the smaller option on a slide-by-slide basis by adding the .smaller attribute to the slide header:

4.1.3.2 Transition speed

You can customize the speed of slide transitions using transition option. This can be "default" , "slower" , "faster" , or a numeric value with a number of seconds (e.g., 0.5 ) . For example:

4.1.3.3 Build slides

Slides can also have a .build attribute that indicate that their content should be displayed incrementally. For example:

Slide attributes can be combined if you need to specify more than one. For example:

4.1.3.4 Background images

You can specify a background image for a slide using the attribute data-background , and use other attributes including data-background-size , data-background-position , and data-background-repeat to tweak the style of the image. You need to be familiar with CSS to fully understand these four attributes, and they correspond to the CSS properties background , background-size , background-position , and background-repeat , respectively. For example:

4.1.3.5 Custom CSS

You can add your own CSS to an ioslides presentation using the css option:

You can also target specific slides or classes of slides with custom CSS by adding IDs or classes to the slides headers within your document. For example the following slide header:

Would enable you to apply CSS to all of its content using either of the following CSS selectors:

4.1.4 Code highlighting

It is possible to select subsets of code for additional emphasis by adding a special “highlight” comment around the code. For example:

The highlighted region will be displayed with a bold font. When you want to help the audience focus exclusively on the highlighted region press the h key and the rest of the code will fade away.

4.1.5 Adding a logo

You can add a logo to the presentation using the logo option (by default, the logo will be displayed in a 85x85 pixel square). For example:

The logo graphic will be rescaled to 85x85 (if necessary) and added to the title slide. A smaller icon version of the logo will be included in the bottom-left footer of each slide.

The logo on the title page and the rectangular element containing it can be customised with CSS. For example:

These selectors are to be placed in the CSS text file.

Similarly, the logo in the footer of each slide can be resized to any desired size. For example:

This will make the footer logo 150 by 75 pixels in size.

4.1.6 Tables

The ioslides template has an attractive default style for tables so you should not hesitate to add tables for presenting more complex sets of information. Pandoc Markdown supports several syntaxes for defining tables, which are described in the Pandoc Manual.

4.1.7 Advanced layout

You can center content on a slide by adding the .flexbox and .vcenter attributes to the slide title. For example:

You can horizontally center content by enclosing it in a div tag with class centered . For example:

You can do a two-column layout using the columns-2 class. For example:

Note that content will flow across the columns so if you want to have an image on one side and text on the other you should make sure that the image has sufficient height to force the text to the other side of the slide.

4.1.8 Text color

You can color content using base color classes red , blue , green , yellow , and gray (or variations of them, e.g., red2 , red3 , blue2 , blue3 , etc.). For example:

4.1.9 Presenter mode

A separate presenter window can also be opened (ideal for when you are presenting on one screen but have another screen that is private to you). The window stays in sync with the main presentation window and also shows presenter notes and a thumbnail of the next slide. To enable presenter mode add ?presentme=true to the URL of the presentation. For example:

The presenter mode window will open and will always re-open with the presentation until it is disabled with:

To add presenter notes to a slide, you include it within a “notes” div . For example:

4.1.10 Printing and PDF output

You can print an ioslides presentation from within browsers that have good support for print CSS (as of this writing, Google Chrome has the best support). Printing maintains most of the visual styles of the HTML version of the presentation.

To create a PDF version of a presentation, you can use the menu Print to PDF from Google Chrome. Alternatively, you can use the function pagedown::chrome_print() from the pagedown package ( Xie et al. 2022 ) , which calls Chrome to print an Rmd or HTML file to PDF.

4.1.11 Custom templates

You can replace the underlying Pandoc template using the template option:

However, please note that the level of customization that can be achieved is limited compared to the templates of other output formats, because the slides are generated by custom formatting written in Lua, and as such the template used must include the string RENDERED_SLIDES as can be found in the default template file with the path rmarkdown:::rmarkdown_system_file("rmd/ioslides/default.html") .

4.1.12 Other features

Refer to Section 3.1 for the documentation of other features of ioslides presentations, including figure options (Section 3.1.5 ), MathJax equations (Section 3.1.8 ), data frame printing (Section 3.1.6 ), Markdown extensions (Section 3.1.10.4 ), keeping Markdown (Section 3.1.10.1 ), document dependencies (Section 3.1.9 ), header and before/after body inclusions (Section 3.1.10.2 ), Pandoc arguments (Section 3.1.10.5 ), and shared options (Section 3.1.11 ).

Mastering R presentations

Do you want to know how to make elegant and simple reproducible presentations? In this talk, we are going to explain how to do presentations in different output formats using one of the easiest and most exhaustive statistical software, R. Now, it is possible create Beamer, PowerPoint, or HTML presentations, including R code, \(\LaTeX\) equations, graphics, or interactive content.

After the tutorial, you will be able to create R presentations on your own with R Markdown in RStudio. But don’t worry if you don’t know a lot of R Markdown, because it’s really simple to use it with RStudio and you will discover the keys to master the language.

We have several options to create amazing technical presentations in pdf format with tools like PowerPoint or \(\LaTeX\) . But the truth is that when we want to generate a full and complete document with graphs, code, and text, then we invest more time in the appearance than in the content itself, or learning how to add content easily. So here I want to show you a good alternative using R. The best feature R has is the flexibility and simplicity of the code to reproduce amazing presentations with little work. To achieve it, R uses Markdown. But, what is exactly Markdown?

What is Markdown?

Markdown is a simple language to write web-based content easy both for writing and reading. The key is that it can be converted to many output formats with a simplified syntax.

Basics of Markdown

Here you have a summary guide of the main style syntax.

Code and syntax highlighting

Blockquotes, tex formula.

Besides these basics, you can to add tables, rulers, links to videos, HTML code, etc. To know more visit the creator’s web site: https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/ or this cheatsheet https://github.com/adam-p/markdown-here/wiki/Markdown-Cheatsheet .

R has a specific file format for this type of documents .Rmd . R Markdown has an online book really useful and detailed here https://bookdown.org/yihui/rmarkdown/ . This tool let you build different type of documents like the next ones:

• Documents : HTML, \(\LaTeX\) /PDF, Microsoft Word, Tufte-style handouts
• Interactive documents : HTML Widgets, Shiny
• Dashboards : Gauges, values boxes, HTML Widgets, Shiny, Storyboard
• Books : HTML, PDF, EPUB
• JSS templates, R Journal, Skeleton, CV
• Package Vignettes
• Presentations : Beamer, Slidy, ioslides, reveal.js, xaringan

In the next link, you will find some examples of each one https://rmarkdown.rstudio.com/gallery.HTML . And in this cheatsheet, a good summary of R Markdown is presented https://rmarkdown.rstudio.com/lesson-15.HTML .

How to start

The first step is to get R and RStudio, and install the package rmarkdown with the code

In the last versions you can directly create presentations going to File -> New File -> R Presentation . Then, a .RPres document is going to be created. This is the simplest, really simplest, way to start but my advice is to go quickly to the next step if you want more flexibility in the slides and final appearance.

So going to File -> New File -> R Markdown and selecting the option Presentation , you are going to have different options to create your slides. Selecting any of them, a file like this is automatically generated:

Depending on the final style of the output there are different output options. In the next points, we are going to explain in detail the main features of all them.

• ioslides : the option output: ioslides_presentation
• slidy : the option output: slidy_presentation
• beamer : the option output: beamer_presentation

The R Markdown file

The header is the R Markdown document part where you can set the title, the author, the date, and the output as the image shows:

But at the same time, other options can be determined as follows:

Once the header is completed, you can add any kind of content that you can practically imagine: R code, equations, charts, images, videos etc. In the next points we are going to see how to add each type of content.

In addition to plain text, headers and other Markdown elements, you have the option of inserting R code which will be executed every time you run the file. These parts of the document are called R chunks . To insert an R Chunk you can use RStudio toolbar Insert button or the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Alt + I on Windows and Cmd + Option + I on macOS.

There are a lot of options referring to how to include tables, text output, figures, etc. For example, to add the option to show in the output the R code before the results you have to add between the brackets {r } the option echo as follows {r echo=TRUE} . By default, the code is not shown.

More options:

• cache : cache results for future knits (default = FALSE)
• cache.path : directory to save cached results in (default = “cache/”)
• child : file(s) to knit and then include (default = NULL)
• collapse : collapse all output into single block (default = FALSE)
• comment : prefix for each line of results (default = ‘##’)
• dependson : chunk dependencies for caching (default = NULL)
• echo : Display code in output document (default = TRUE)
• engine : code language used in chunk (default = ‘R’)
• error : Display error messages in doc (TRUE) or stop render when errors occur (FALSE) (default = FALSE)
• eval : Run code in chunk (default = TRUE)
• message : display code messages in document (default = TRUE)
• results=asis : passthrough results
• results=hide : do not display results
• results=hold : put all results below all code
• tidy : tidy code for display (default = FALSE)
• warning : display code warnings in document (default = TRUE)
• fig.align : ‘lef’, ‘right’, or ‘center’ (default = ‘default’)
• fig.cap : figure caption as character string (default = NULL)
• fig.height, fig.width : Dimensions of plots in inches
• highlight : highlight source code (default = TRUE)
• include : Include chunk in doc after running (default = TRUE)

In the next link you can find more details about R chunks: https://bookdown.org/yihui/rmarkdown/r-code.HTML

There is the chance to add equations to your presentations with MathJax scripts. These are included in HTML documents for rendering \(\LaTeX\) and MathML equations. To control how MathJax is included you have the next options:

• default to use an HTTPS URL from a CDN host (currently provided by RStudio)
• local : to use a local version of MathJax (which is copied into the output directory). Note that when using “local” you also need to set the self_contained option to false.
• URL indicating the location to load MathJax
• null to exclude MathJax entirely.

For example, to use a local copy of MathJax:

To use a self-hosted copy of MathJax:

You have four options to add tables. First one, directly from R Markdown

or the next ones, from R code with the libraries knitr , xtable , or stargazer .

Interactive graphs

In R there are a lot of packages to create interactive graphs. Highcharter is one of them, as well as the well-known HTMLwidgets . Here we have an example of a highcharter graph.

Presentation formats

We just explored the different contents and parts of our R Markdown document. Let’s see what type of output format we can obtain.

Ioslides is a nice R presentation format characterized by the simplicity of the result. There are some features specific from ioslides, such as the display mode

• f : enable fullscreen mode
• w : toggle widescreen mode
• o : enable overview mode
• h : enable code highlight mode
• p : show presenter notes

or the incremental bullets:

Moreover, you can change the presentation size, the text size, or even the transition speed in the header of the document. Specifically, for the transition speed you can set the number of seconds for each slide or use the standard options: default , slower , faster .

For another hand, there is a quick way to add a background image without editing the CSS file,

But if you want to add specific style changes to your presentation, I recommend you to edit the CSS file and add it to the header of the RMarkdown document:

One of the disadvantages of ioslides is that customization is limited compared with other output formats. At the end of this tutorial we explain how to modify by your own a CSS file.

Slidy has more flexibility than ioslides as to appearance and style. Now we are going to see some of the main special features that slidy has.

There is the chance to change the display mode with the next shortcuts;

• c : Show table of contents
• c : Toggles the display of the footer
• a : Toggles display of current vs all slides (useful for printing handouts)
• s : Make fonts smaller
• b : Make fonts larger

And we can adjust the font directly in the header of the document without editing the CSS file:

You will find other interesting features of slidy such as the countdown timer in the footer or the customized footer text that can be easily added with the options duration and footer .

Slidy themes

In slidy, there are different Boostrap themes to use drawn from the Bootswatch theme library. The themes are default , cerulean , journal , flatly , darkly , readable , spacelab , united , cosmo , lumen , paper , sandstone , simplex , and yeti . To add your own style with a CSS file, pass null in the theme parameter.

Moreover, the syntax highlighting style can be specified with the option highlight . Supported styles are default , tango , pygments , kate , monochrome , espresso , zenburn , haddock , and textmate . And you have the option of preventing syntax highlighting passing null to the parameter.

Beamer is a \(\LaTeX\) class to produce presentations and slides. It is so common in academia and so useful to add mathematical formulas and expressions. You can create your own Beamer presentations from R without a deep knowledge of \(\LaTeX\) (only Markdown).

So the first step is to install tex. Tex is a typesetting for complex mathematical formulae used in \(\LaTeX\) . To install it, download tone of the next programs, depending on your OS system: - MikTeX on Windows - MacTeX 2013+ on OS X - TeX Live 2013+ on Linux

Beamer themes are the same that you can find in \(\LaTeX\) . In the next link https://hartwork.org/beamer-theme-matrix/ you have the list of the different available header options related to the appearance and style:

There are other interesting options to create presentations in R such as reveal.js and xaringan. Reveal is very well-known because of the flexibility in the themes and transitions by default, the vertical slides or the possibility to include a web site inside a slide. In this part, we are going to explain how to generate a revealjs file and the main features of this awesome library.

First of all, it is required to install revealjs package

Then, you can directly change in the R Markdown document header the output argument to revealjs_presentation or go to menu File -> New File -> R Markdown -> From template and select reveal.js presentation.

There are some amazing keyboard shortcuts:

- f for fullscreen - o or ESC for overview mode - alt or ( ctrl in Linux) and click an element, to zoom this element - s for speaker view (so pretty!) - B or . to pause the presentation

And there is a lot of variety about appearance and styles. If you want to change how the presentation looks like, you can choose any of the next theme options: default , simple , sky , beige , serif , solarized , blood , moon , night , black , league , and white . And for the syntax highlighting style: default , tango , pygments , kate , monochrome , espresso , zenburn , and haddock . Pass null to prevent syntax highlighting. The way to specify it is the same than the previous presentation types.

In revealjs you can center the text of the slides changing the center option to true, which by default is false, as well as the possibility of modifying the transitions and backgrounds, i.e. how the slide is going to move to the next one. Available transitions and background_transitions are default , fade , slide , convex , concave , zoom or none . Any of these global options can be overriden specifying the data-transition attribute in the header of the slide:

Moreover, Revealjs lets add different backgrounds like color, image, video, and iframe:

Finally, you can specify the level of heading will be used with the slide_level option. For example, if the slide_level is 2, the level-1 headers will be built horizontally and level-2 headers, vertically.

Other interesting features are the great look on touch devices, the fragmented slides, easy to export to pdf, keyboard bindings, or the parallax scrolling background.

References https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=revealjs .

Ninja presentation

The last type of presentations that we are going to see is the xaringan library. It is an R Markdown extension based on the JavaScript library remark.js ( https://remarkjs.com ). This package was originally designed for “ninja”, so it is recommended to people that have a well-known of CSS. For another hand, if you need slides to be self-contained, then xaringan it is not a good option because needs a webserver to run. Another bad news is that xaringan doesn’t work well with HTML widgets.

To install the library type

or install it directly from GitHub to ensure that you are downloading the last version

Once you get installed, go to the menu File -> New File -> R Markdown -> From template and click on ninja presentation.

Note: If you understand chinese you can select the last option ;).

The header is going to look like this

A lit bit more complicated than others and as you will see, there are some funny arguments that make this library really different.

• css : to add your own CSS file,
• self_contained : to produce a self-contained HTML file
• seal : to generate a title slide automatically using the YAML metadata of the R Markdown document (if FALSE, you should write the title slide by yourself)
• yolo : to insert the Mustache Karl (TM) randomly in the slides. Using TRUE, a number between 0-1 to insert the Mustache Karl in a percentage of the slides, or even a list(times = n, img = path)
• chakra : path to the remark.js library (can be either local or remote).
• nature : (Nature transformation) A list of configurations to be passed to remark.create(), e.g. list(ratio = ‘16:9’, navigation = list(click = TRUE)); see https://github.com/gnab/remark/wiki/Configuration

Besides the options provided by remark.js, there are others such interesting like autoplay the slides or the countdown timer. Slides can be automatically played setting the autoplay option under nature (in milliseconds). For example, to display slides every 30 seconds and see the countdown timer:

It is possible to highlight code lines turning the option highlightLines to true or to extend the markdown syntax defining custom macros with the beforeInit option under the option nature.

Adding your CSS file

Some of the previous presentation formats give us the chance to add a customized CSS file. To know how to change a specific element you can inspect it with any web browser and focus exactly on what you want to modify by yourself. An example of a basic modification in a CSS file is the next one. Here we are selecting the background color of the body, the color of the headers and the full text for the reveal presentation, and the size of the h1 header:

Then you have to save the CSS file in the same path that your R presentation document.

How to export the presentation

With all the HTML output it is possible to export the presentation to pdf with any web browser using the menu Print to PDF from Google Chrome, for example. But there is another alternative like publishing the presentation online in RPubs or GitHub. You must be registered in any of the two platforms to be able to add your work. For RPubs, you have to invoke the More -> Publish to RPubs command from the presentation toolbar, and in GitHub, you have to create a new repository with the HTML document and all the style files associated, and enable to GitHub pages to this repository. Here you have the steps to do it: https://pages.github.com/ .

Basic example

Finally, let’s show you a simple reveal.js example to get you started.

After knitting this, here is the result:

Conclusions

RStudio is an awesome framework that provides you the chance to create nice presentations with a simple syntax, adding interactive content, and with a professional and modern style. Moreover, your presentation will be reproducible if you want to make any change, as well as you can save your templates to use them in the future. In my opinion, it is a really good alternative to other traditional software to create presentations and so easy to work with it. I hope it is so useful for you too :)

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