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Beamer is a powerful and flexible LaTeX class to create great looking presentations. This article outlines the basis steps to making a Beamer slideshow: creating the title page, adding a logo, highlighting important points, making a table of contents and adding effects to the slideshow.

• 1 Introduction
• 2.1 The title page
• 2.2 Creating a table of contents
• 2.3 Adding effects to a presentation
• 3 Highlighting important sentences/words
• 4.1.1 Berkeley theme
• 4.1.2 Copenhagen theme
• 4.1.3 Using a colortheme
• 4.2.1 Font sizes
• 4.2.2 Font types
• 4.3 Columns
• 5 Reference guide
• 6 Further reading

Introduction

A minimal working example of a simple beamer presentation is provided below.

 Open this beamer document in Overleaf

After compilation, a two-page PDF file will be produced. The first page is the titlepage, and the second one contains sample content.

The first statement in the document declares this is a Beamer slideshow: \documentclass{beamer}

The first command after the preamble, \frame{\titlepage} , generates the title page. This page may contain information about the author, institution, event, logo, and so on. See the title page section for a more complete example.

The frame environment creates the second slide, the self-descriptive command \frametitle{Sample frame title} is optional.

It is worth noting that in beamer the basic container is a frame . A frame is not exactly equivalent to a slide, one frame may contain more than one slides. For example, a frame with several bullet points can be set up to produce a new slide to reveal each consecutive bullet point.

Beamer main features

The Beamer class offers some useful features to bring your presentation to life and make it more attractive. The most important ones are listed below.

The title page

There are some more options for the title page than the ones presented in the introduction . The next example is a complete one, most of the commands are optional.

 Open an example of the beamer package in Overleaf

The distribution of each element in the title page depends on the theme, see the Themes subsection for more information. Here is a description of each command:

Creating a table of contents

Usually when you have a long presentation, it's convenient to divide it into sections or even subsections. In this case, you can add a table of contents at the beginning of the document. Here is an example:

As you see, is simple. Inside the frame environment you set the title and add the command \titlepage .

It's also possible to put the table of contents at the beginning of each section and highlight the title of the current section. Just add the code below to the preamble of your L a T e X document:

If you use \AtBeginSubsection[] instead of \AtBeginSection[] , the table of contents will appear at the beginning of each subsection.

Adding effects to a presentation

In the introduction , we saw a simple slide using the \begin{frame} \end{frame} delimiters. It was mentioned that a frame is not equivalent to a slide , and the next example will illustrate why, by adding some effects to the slideshow. In this example, the PDF file produced will contain 4 slides—this is intended to provide a visual effect in the presentation.

 Open this frame in Overleaf (using \usetheme{Madrid} )

In the code there's a list, declared by the \begin{itemize} \end{itemize} commands, and next to each item is a number enclosed in two special characters: < > . This will determine in which slide the element will appear, if you append a - at the end of the number, the item will be shown in that and the subsequent slides of the current frame , otherwise it will appear only in that slide. Check the animation for a better understanding of this.

These effects can be applied to any type of text, not only to the itemize environment. There's a second command whose behaviour is similar, but it's simpler since you don't have to specify the slides where the text will be unveiled.

This code will generate three slides to add a visual effect to the presentation. \pause will prevent the text below this point and above the next \pause declaration to appear in the current slide.

Highlighting important sentences/words

In a presentation is a good practice to highlight the important points to make it easier for your audience to identify the main topic.

If you want to highlight a word or a phrase within a paragraph, the command \alert{} will change the style of the word inside the braces. The way the enclosed text will look depends on the theme you are using.

To highlight a paragraph with concepts, definitions, theorems or examples, the best option is to put it inside a box. There are three types of box, and it's up to you to decide which one better fits in your presentation:

Customizing your presentation

There are some aspects of a Beamer presentation that can be easily customized. For instance, you can set different themes, colours and change the default text layout into a two-column format.

Themes and colorthemes

It's really easy to use a different theme in your slideshow. For example, the Madrid theme (most of the slideshows in this article use this theme) is set by adding the following command to the preamble:

\usetheme{Madrid}

Below are two more examples.

Berkeley theme

You can  open this LaTeX code in Overleaf to explore the Berkeley theme.

Copenhagen theme

You can  open this LaTeX code in Overleaf to explore the Copenhagen theme.

Using a colortheme

A theme can be combined with a colortheme to change the colour used for different elements.

You must put the \usecolortheme statement below the \usetheme command. You can  open this LaTeX code in Overleaf to explore the Madrid theme with the beaver colortheme. For various options, check out the table of screenshots of different themes and colorthemes in the Reference guide below.

You can change several parameters about the fonts. Here we will mention how to resize them and change the type of font used.

The font size, here 17pt , can be passed as a parameter to the beamer class at the beginning of the document preamble: \documentclass[17pt]{beamer} . Below is an example showing the result of using the 17pt font-size option:

Available font sizes are 8pt, 9pt, 10pt, 11pt, 12pt, 14pt, 17pt, 20pt. Default font size is 11pt (which corresponds to 22pt at the full screen mode).

To change the font types in your beamer presentation there are two ways, either you use a font theme or import directly a font from your system. Let's begin with a font theme:

 Open a beamer document using these settings in Overleaf

The \usefonttheme{} is self-descriptive. The available themes are: structurebold, structurebolditalic, structuresmallcapsserif, structureitalicsserif, serif and default.

You can also import font families installed in your system.

The command \usepackage{bookman} imports the bookman family font to be used in the presentation. The available fonts depend on your L a T e X installation, the most common are: mathptmx, helvet, avat, bookman, chancery, charter, culer, mathtime, mathptm, newcent, palatino, and pifont.

Sometimes the information in a presentation looks better in a two-column format. In such cases use the columns environment:

After the frame and frametitle declarations start a new columns environment delimited by the \begin{columns} \end{columns} . You can declare each column's width with the \column{0.5\textwidth} code, a lower number will shrink the width size.

Reference guide

Below is a table with screenshots of the title page and a normal slide in Beamer using different combinations of themes (rows) and colorthemes (columns). To have a complete list of themes and colorthemes see the further reading section for references.

Further reading

For more information, see the full package documentation here . The following resources may also be useful:

• Bold, italics and underlining
• Font sizes, families, and styles
• Text alignment
• Font typefaces
• Inserting Images
• Using colours in LaTeX
• Lengths in LaTeX
• International language support
• TikZ package
• Beamer User's Guide - The beamer class
• Documentation Home
• Learn LaTeX in 30 minutes

Overleaf guides

• Creating a document in Overleaf
• Uploading a project
• Copying a project
• Creating a project from a template
• Using the Overleaf project menu
• Including images in Overleaf
• Exporting your work from Overleaf
• Working offline in Overleaf
• Using Track Changes in Overleaf
• Using bibliographies in Overleaf
• Sharing your work with others
• Using the History feature
• Debugging Compilation timeout errors
• How-to guides
• Guide to Overleaf’s premium features

LaTeX Basics

• Creating your first LaTeX document
• Choosing a LaTeX Compiler
• Paragraphs and new lines

Mathematics

• Mathematical expressions
• Subscripts and superscripts
• Brackets and Parentheses
• Fractions and Binomials
• Aligning equations
• Spacing in math mode
• Integrals, sums and limits
• Display style in math mode
• List of Greek letters and math symbols
• Mathematical fonts
• Using the Symbol Palette in Overleaf

Figures and tables

• Positioning Images and Tables
• Lists of Tables and Figures
• Drawing Diagrams Directly in LaTeX

References and Citations

• Bibliography management with bibtex
• Bibliography management with natbib
• Bibliography management with biblatex
• Bibtex bibliography styles
• Natbib bibliography styles
• Natbib citation styles
• Biblatex bibliography styles
• Biblatex citation styles
• Multilingual typesetting on Overleaf using polyglossia and fontspec
• Multilingual typesetting on Overleaf using babel and fontspec
• Quotations and quotation marks

Document structure

• Sections and chapters
• Table of contents
• Cross referencing sections, equations and floats
• Nomenclatures
• Management in a large project
• Multi-file LaTeX projects
• Lengths in L a T e X
• Headers and footers
• Page numbering
• Paragraph formatting
• Line breaks and blank spaces
• Page size and margins
• Single sided and double sided documents
• Multiple columns
• Code listing
• Code Highlighting with minted
• Margin notes
• Supporting modern fonts with X Ǝ L a T e X

Presentations

• Environments

Field specific

• Theorems and proofs
• Chemistry formulae
• Feynman diagrams
• Molecular orbital diagrams
• Chess notation
• Knitting patterns
• CircuiTikz package
• Pgfplots package
• Typesetting exams in LaTeX
• Attribute Value Matrices

Class files

• Understanding packages and class files
• List of packages and class files
• Writing your own package
• Writing your own class

Advanced TeX/LaTeX

• In-depth technical articles on TeX/LaTeX

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• How to make a presentation with Latex - Introduction to Beamer
• exampleblock
• compilation
• beamergotobutton
• presentation

We shall see in this article how to make a presentation with LaTeX, using the powerful class Beamer. If you want to make an outstanding “stressfree” presentation and bring your ideas or your work under a whole new light, let’s get started!!!

Installing the Beamer class

You will first need to install the package Beamer . Under Debian or Ubuntu, you can type the following command:

Once the latex-class Beamer is installed, you are definitely ready to stat your first presentation!!!

Basic presentation with Beamer

A few explanations:

means that our document is a Beamer presentation

this package enables us to use special letters (with accents, cedillas, etc). You can discard this command when the presentation is in English.

This is our outer theme (color and background). As you can imagine, there are tons of themes. You can refer to Beamer documentation for more details.

this defines the title of the presentation. As you can see, there are two titles:

• the first one, between brackets. [Making a LaTeX presentation with Beamer] is a substitute title which appears at the bottom of the page. This is useful especially if the original title is long. Since this is anoption only, if it is not mentioned, then the original title is the one shown in the bottom of the page.
• the second one, between braces, is the principal title of the presentation. The command

defines Nadir Soualem and Astozzia (us!) as the authors of the presentation.

defines where the presentation was held. Finally, we use

as the date.

To define the document, we use the markers

To define a slide of the presentation, we use the markers

To define a page title (frame), we mention it as follows

Introduction will be the title of the page. To define the first page, which contains details such as the title, the author, the date, etc - we use a frame in which we include the \titlepage command

To define a frame containing the layout of the presentation, we proceed as follows:

The layout is therefore mentioned at every section and subsection. You should insert \section and \subsection throughout the presentation and out of the frames:

Animations – Overlays

A good presentation is one that is dynamic and attracts the audience’s interest. Generally, we resort to a dynamic type of presentations. Alternatively stated, when we speak, we simultaneously show significant points of the talk, or hide others, or keep just the important ones. We shall see in this section how animations function in Beamer.

Item-by-item list view: the \pause command

In order to view several items of a list on the same slide, we type the following commands inside a frame:

We will thus see the items of our list, one by one.

Item-by-item list view: the \item<n-> command

An alternative way to visualize the elements of a list item by item is to use the \item<n-> command, where n is a natural number referring to the slide, beginning from which the item appears.

List item interval and isolated items: the \item<n-> and \item<p> commands

An example is worth a long speech:

\item<n-> means that the list item will appear on slides numbered n to m, whereas \item<p> means that the item will appear on slide p.

Item-by-item long list view: the [<+->] command

Sometimes the lists you want to display are long and it is not practical to use the \item<n-> command. An alternative solution is the use of the [<+->] command

Up to now, we have dealt with lists. We shall now see how to use text and slides.

Displaying and hiding text in slides: the \uncover<n->, \uncover<n-> and \uncover<p> commands

\uncover<n-> will display the text from slide n on; \uncover<n-> means the text element will appear from slide n to m. Finally, \uncover<p> means that the text will appear on slide p. Here is a case in point of a frame containing the \uncover command.

Be careful not to forget the braces after the \uncover command. The syntax is as follows:

Displaying and hiding text in slides: the \only<n->, \only<n-> and \only<p> commands

\only works like \uncover with the exception that the \only command is not as “cumbersome” on slides. Here is an example:

Here is an other example to better grasp the difference between \only and \uncover

Hide text in slides: the \invisible<n> commands

\invisible<n> makes text invisible on slide n

Another alternative: the \alt<n>{…}{…} commands

As an alternative, one can use the \alt<n>{…}{…} command on a slide. The first argument is the value on slide n. The second is for values other than n. Here is an example:

Highlighting text in red: the \alert<n>{…} command

To highlight text in red on slide n, we use the \alert<n>{…} command.

Successively highlighting list items in red: the <+-| alert@+> command

Using colors in a text on a slide: the \color<n->{…}{…}, \color<n->{…}{…} and\color<p>{…}{…} commands.

The first argument is the red, green, yellow, blue, etc … The second is the text to be colored

Creating links: the \hyperlink{…}{\beamergotobutton{…}} commands

To define internal links, we should add the following package in the preamble

Then, we should define a label pointing on the frame:

you define MY_LABEL as you please ! Finally, on the frame where the link is to be created, we proceed as follows:

There we are! We can see a button Refer to this page pointing to the frame labeled MY_LABEL .

Thus, the first argument of \hyperlink{…}{\beamergotobutton{…}} is the name of the label to be pointed at and \beamergotobutton{…} has the name of the button as an argument.

Defining blocks inside frames

For important stuff, we define blocks as follows:

As clear as onion soup !!!

Dynamic display of tables: the \pause and \onslide<n-> commands

First off, we should add the package colortbl to the preamble

To display rows dynamically, we shall use the \pause command as follows:

To display columns dynamically, we shall use the \onslide<n-> command as follows:

Writing on several columns: the \begin{columns}...\end{columns} commands

For two columns, we proceed as follows:

l,r,c refers to the position: left, right, center. The syntax is as follows:

Inserting a figure in a Beamer presentation

To insert an image or a figure, we proceed as in LaTeX by using the \includegraphics command. Here is an example:

In Beamer, we should distinguish between two types of figures:

• PS type: .eps, .ps and pspicture type (LaTeX)
• General type: .pdf, .png, .jpg, .jpeg You will need to compile a Beamer-class file.

Compiling a Beamer presentation

I assume that the your file is called file.tex. . There are ways to compile, depending on the type of figure you inserted. For PS-type figures, we shall use the following commands

We shall obtain the file file.pdf.

For general-type figures, we shall use the command

We shall also obtain the file file.pdf.

It goes without saying that explaining all the possibilities that Beamer offers is way too long. Have look to the official documentation, which is more exhaustive.

Have fun !!!

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How to create presentations with Beamer

Vector Open Stock. CC BY-SA 3.0.

Beamer is a LaTeX package for generating presentation slide decks. One of its nicest features is that it can take advantage of LaTeX's powerful typesetting system and all the other packages in its ecosystem. For example, I often use LaTeX's listings package in Beamer presentations that include code.

Starting a presentation

To begin a Beamer document, enter:

As you would with any other LaTeX document, add any packages you want to use. For example, to use the listings package, enter:

Place all content inside the document environment:

Beamer documents are usually a sequence of frame environments. Frames that contain code should be marked fragile :

Begin your frames with a title:

Testing your code before you present it

One of the worst feelings in the world is giving a talk and realizing, as you walk through the code, that there is a glaring bug in it—maybe a misspelled keyword or an unclosed brace.

The solution is to test code that is presented. In most presentation environments, this means creating a separate file, writing tests, then copying and pasting.

However, with Beamer, there is a better way. Imagine you have a file named do_stuff.py that contains code. You can write tests for the do_stuff.py code in a second file, which you call test_do_stuff.py , and can exercise it with, say, pytest . However, most of the lines in do_stuff.py lack pedagogic value, like defining helper functions.

To simplify things for your audience, you can import just the lines you want to talk about into the frame in your presentation :

Since you will be talking through those lines (from 8 to 15), you don't need any other content on the slide. Close the frame:

On the next slide, you want to show a usage example for the do_stuff() function you just presented:

You use the same file, but this time you show the lines that call the function. Finally, close the document:

Assuming you have an appropriate Python file in do_stuff.py , this will produce a short two-slide presentation.

Beamer also supports necessary features such as progressive revelation, showing only one bullet at a time to prevent the audience from being distracted by reading ahead.": \pause inside a list will divide bullets into pages:

Creating handouts

My favorite feature in Beamer is that you can set it to ignore everything outside a frame with \documentclass[ignorenonframetext]{beamer} . When I prepare a presentation, I leave off the top (where the document class is declared) and auto-generate two versions of it: one with Beamer that ignores all text outside any frame, which I use for my presentation, and one with a header like:

which generates a handout—a PDF that has all the frames and all the text between them.

When a conference organizer asks me to publish my slides, I include the original slide deck as a reference, but the main thing I like people to have is the handout, which has all the explanatory text that I don't want to include on the slide deck itself.

When creating presentation slides, people often wonder whether it's better to optimize their materials for the presentation or for people who want to read them afterward. Fortunately, Beamer provides the best of both worlds.

Related Content

For Beautiful Presentations

— use powerpoint beamer —.

LEARN BEAMER

What is Beamer?

Beamer is a LaTeX document class that is used for creating presentations. This class offers several pre-designed templates and a set of interesting features for making customized ones.

American pronunciation

British pronunciation, origin of beamer.

This class is a great contribution of Till Tantau  where the first version of the Beamer presentation was published in public on the Ph.D. defense of Till. As per the request of some of his colleagues, he included the package in CTAN . in March 2003. It was considered as the first official release of “Initial Version”.

Since 2007, this package was not maintained and in April 2010, Till handed the maintenance responsibility to   Joseph Wright and Vedran Miletic .

At the present, it’s mainly samcarter doing the work and keep maintaining it by refining codes, fixing bugs, including new features, and providing supports to users, but Joseph Wright has the lead formally, e.g. does the releases to CTAN.

If you are interested in the Beamer package and contribute through feedback please visit  https://github.com/josephwright/Beamer . The User Guide of 247 pages (version no 3.6.3) of this class provides enormous examples and descriptions of different commands.

Beamer Output

The ultimate output of any Latex Beamer presentation is naturally a PDF (Portable Document Format) file .

PDF is independent of:

• hardware (i.e. any type of printer, iPad, E-reader, smartphones, projector, etc.) and
• software (Windows & Apple operating systems).

which makes this format good for both printouts and presentations.

Features of Beamer class

• Beamer is compatible with pdflatex , dvips , lualatex , and xelatex .
• You can use most of the standard commands of LaTeX for Beamer presentation as well.
• A user can create overlays easily and add dynamic effects.
• Have features for creating both slides and handouts.
• Easy customization of Beamer Themes, which allow you to change the appearance of your presentation to accomplish your purposes. For example, users can change layouts, colors, fonts, bullet styles in any presentation globally .
• Beamer handles theorems , proofs , definitions , and itemization in a structured approach, along with flexible customization.
• The Beamer class separates the style as well as content and ensures the portability in source code , implementation, and output.
• Like LaTeX, Beamer has excellent mathematical and scientific typesetting capabilities without exporting any external tools.
• It also supports hypertext features and cross-referencing capabilities.

Drawbacks of Beamer class

• Some users may feel the learning curve is steeper, especially while experimenting with macros and exploit customization.
• Some command syntax is tough to remember and type.
• Sometimes, positioning floating objects like images, long tables seem complex to a group of users.
• Sharing with WYSIWYG content is difficult, as the mainstream in a commercial environment is using MS PowerPoint.

Rob Williams

Data Scientist

• Google Scholar

Better Beamer Presentations the Easy Way

October 01, 2019 9 minute read

Everyone knows that Beamer makes frankly terrible presentations without a good deal of help. A well crafted Beamer presentation can be a thing of beauty, especially since you can use knitr or R Markdown to automatically generate tables and figures, but it takes a lot of work. We all have our own little tricks to do things like get more space between items in a list (ending every \item line with \\~\\ ) and the simple but repetitive tasks we have to do every single slide (opening a \Large environment to make text more readable).

Three little tricks

I finally got tired of all this and decided to waste a lot of time now to save even more time later. To do that, I headed to Stack Exchange and started digging into the Beamer documentation.

Give me some space

We’ll start with the base Beamer class. There are a number of Beamer themes that are much better than the default theme, but I’m going to focus on things we can do to improve even the default theme. Here’s our humble starting point.

The first thing anyone who’s ever taken a graphic design class will tell you is that we need to space out those lines. With them all crammed in the middle, they’re harder to read and there’s ton of empty space up top and down below. We can insert a \vfill at the top and bottom of the slide, and between each line, but this gets old quickly. After plenty of googling and a few less than perfect solutions, I came across this Stack Exchange answer . By adding the following code to your preamble, any items in a \itemize environment will be evenly spaced vertically.

Looking better already!

Super size it

Next we need to enlarge our text to make it easier to read. Again, we can do this manually on every slide, but that’s a giant pain. I found this old thread on latex.org which explains how to redefine the font size of \itemize and \enumerate items.

While this has fixed the font size of our lists, now our still too small equation will look even more out of place. I learned from this Stack Exchange answer that the \[ and \] math mode separators actually call the equation* environment. With this knowledge, I used the etoolbox package’s \BeforeBeginEnvironment and \AfterEndEnvironment commands to change the font size to LARGE for any equation* environments.

Now we’ve got a much more readable slide that will be automatically replicated for every other slide in our presentation. If you have multi-line equations in your slides, you can similarly redefine the align* environment to enlarge these equations as well.

Don’t forget numbers

As we can see above, our redefinition of the \itemize environment also evenly spaces sub-bullets. However, it doesn’t do anything for numbered lists defined with /enumerate as the slide below shows.

To evenly space items in numbered lists, we just need to take the same changes to the \itemize environment we introduced above, and apply them to the \enumerate environment as well. Unfortunately, I’m not nearly fluent enough in TeX to understand what this code does. Luckily, I know how to run a diff . Diffing two files will point out all differences between the two. By comparing the modified code from Stack Exchange with the original in beamerbaselocalstructure.sty , we can figure out which lines have been added and copy them over to Beamer’s definition of the \enumerate environment.

Essentially, the new code redefines the \itemsep length parameter as \vfill and adds a \vfil at the end of an \itemize environment. \vfil and \vfil are both commands to create vertical space, and this Stack Exchange answer explains the difference between them, but I still have no idea what the difference is after reading it. What matters is that the \enumerate environment definition looks identical to the \itemize one in the lines surrounding the new code (with the substitution of \endenumerate for \enditemize ), which makes it easy to add it to this definition as well.

Once we’ve done that, now numbered lists are also evenly spaced!

All together now

Sticking all of the below in your preamble will greatly improve the visual appeal of your slides with zero effort required on each individual slide.

I’ve combined all of the LaTeX code above into a style file called better-beamer.sty available on my GitHub. To avoid having to copy and paste this code into the preamble of every presentation you make, you can just load the style file instead! If you place the style file into the same directory as your .tex file, you just need to add:

If you want to avoid having to copy the style file every time you make a new presentation, you can just use an absolute path to reference it in your .tex document. On my computer, this looks like this:

One caveat if you use R Markdown like I do. R Markdown relies on pandoc to convert from .Rmd to .md to .tex to .pdf (phew). This only matters if you’re a lazy typist like me and write your

When you write your lists in the former format, pandoc redefines \itemsep to 0pt in any list (bulleted or numbered) environment in the the resulting LaTeX code via the following command:

This will cancel out our redefined list environments and get us back our original cramped lines. There’s no way to disable this \tightlist behavior (short of removing it from the source code and compiling pandoc yourself), but it is very easy to neutralize thanks to the info in this Stack Exchange answer . If you’re using R Markdown, simply add the following to your YAML header under the header-includes variable.

This will come after the \tightlist definition in the preamble and redefine it to do nothing, leaving our properly spaced lists intact without having to add an empty line after every item. At some point I’ll post my custom LaTeX template (with other aesthetic improvements) for Beamer slides via R Markdown and talk about my process for modifying the default template.

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How to Make a “Good” Presentation “Great”

• Guy Kawasaki

Remember: Less is more.

A strong presentation is so much more than information pasted onto a series of slides with fancy backgrounds. Whether you’re pitching an idea, reporting market research, or sharing something else, a great presentation can give you a competitive advantage, and be a powerful tool when aiming to persuade, educate, or inspire others. Here are some unique elements that make a presentation stand out.

• Fonts: Sans Serif fonts such as Helvetica or Arial are preferred for their clean lines, which make them easy to digest at various sizes and distances. Limit the number of font styles to two: one for headings and another for body text, to avoid visual confusion or distractions.
• Colors: Colors can evoke emotions and highlight critical points, but their overuse can lead to a cluttered and confusing presentation. A limited palette of two to three main colors, complemented by a simple background, can help you draw attention to key elements without overwhelming the audience.
• Pictures: Pictures can communicate complex ideas quickly and memorably but choosing the right images is key. Images or pictures should be big (perhaps 20-25% of the page), bold, and have a clear purpose that complements the slide’s text.
• Layout: Don’t overcrowd your slides with too much information. When in doubt, adhere to the principle of simplicity, and aim for a clean and uncluttered layout with plenty of white space around text and images. Think phrases and bullets, not sentences.

As an intern or early career professional, chances are that you’ll be tasked with making or giving a presentation in the near future. Whether you’re pitching an idea, reporting market research, or sharing something else, a great presentation can give you a competitive advantage, and be a powerful tool when aiming to persuade, educate, or inspire others.

• Guy Kawasaki is the chief evangelist at Canva and was the former chief evangelist at Apple. Guy is the author of 16 books including Think Remarkable : 9 Paths to Transform Your Life and Make a Difference.

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