My position as former pure mathematician who is now out in the real world allows me to look at slide-show presentation with my critical chalk-dusted eye. Here are some tool that I found useful when I had to make slides for my presentations. No, I don’t use PowerPoint.
Preparing slides
- LaTeX and Beamer. The right tools to create slides! Much more robust than other programs such as PowerPoint. Making a Beamer presentation is especially easy if you have material that you can reuse from papers and other LaTeX documents. Switching to Beamer could seem a daunting task, but it’s going to be worth it: it just takes to adapt your work-flow, and then you’ll realize the benefits.
- The LaTeX package listings comes very handy when you have to display source code in your slides.
Presenting slides
- In a GNU/Linux environment, pdfpc, alias PDF presenter console, is excellent for presenting your beamer slides. It supports external screens and shows useful extra information on your screen as you present (e.g. timer, preview of the following slide, notes, …)
- Similar to the previous, but for Mac, the OSX program Présentation.app is brilliant for presenting your Beamer slides. It even allows to draw on the slides, show web pages and videos, display pdf annotations as speaker’s notes, etc.
- Impressive is a new program doing the same task, and it is available also for Windows. I haven’t tried it yet.