power point presentation in latex

How To Insert a LaTeX Equation in PowerPoint? [Full Guide!]

By: Author Shrot Katewa

To create an academic presentation, you can quickly write equations using symbol options but inserting a LaTeX equation is still a challenge as there are no direct options provided by PowerPoint. However, we have some quick tricks you can use for this purpose.

To insert a LaTeX equation in PowerPoint, select the equation in the LaTeX compilation and click “copy” from the “Right-Click” menu. Open the slide, “Right-click” on the text box you want to insert the equation and choose “Keep Source Formatting” from the “Paste” options to insert the equation as it is.

You can also insert the LaTeX equation as an image while taking a screenshot of the PDF version of the LaTeX file. Besides, the LaTeX equation can be generated in MS Word from where you can copy and then paste it into Powerpoint keeping the source formatting.

If you’re also among those who struggle to insert a LaTeX equation in PowerPoint, we’ve got you covered. Let’s get started with the complete guide below:

1. How to Insert an Equation in PowerPoint?

In Microsoft PowerPoint, you can insert an equation using the “Insert” menu. There are numerous features available to write an equation on a slide. To insert an equation in PowerPoint, follow the 4 easy steps.

Step-1: Click on the “Insert” tab

The first step is to open the “Insert” menu. To do so, click on the “Insert” tab in the menu ribbon located at the top of the screen.

Step-2: Click on the “Equation” icon

In the “Insert” menu, click on the down arrow under the “Symbols” option. Then click on the “Equation” icon in the dropdown list under the “Symbols” option. Do not click on the down arrow under the “Equation” icon.

Step-3: Click on the “Equation” tab

Now you have to click on the equation box in the slide to select it. Then click on the “Equation” tab in the menu ribbon located at the top of the screen. This will expand the “Equation” toolbar.

Step-4: Write the Equation

Finally, you can write the equation in the equation box inserted into the slide. You can use the features available in the “Equation” toolbar to write the equation.

2. How to Insert a LaTex Equation in PowerPoint?

Microsoft PowerPoint does not support LaTex codes, unlike Microsoft Word. So you cannot insert a LaTex equation directly into a PowerPoint presentation. However, you can use some workarounds to insert the LaTex equation into a slide.

2.1 Method 1: Using Copy and Paste

The simplest way to insert a LaTex equation in a PowerPoint presentation slide is to paste it into the slide.

However, this only works for linear equations. Any equation with exponents cannot be pasted using this method. For such equations, you can either rewrite them following the steps detailed in section 1 or insert them using other methods described in the article.

To insert an equation using the copy and paste method, follow the 2 easy steps.

Step-1: Click on the “Copy” option

In the LaTex compilation, select the linear equation that you want to insert into the PowerPoint presentation. Then “Right Click” on the equation and click on the “Copy” option from the right-click menu.

You can alternatively press the “Ctrl+C” keys on your keyboard to copy the equation.

Step-2: Click on the “Keep Source Formatting” option

Now you can open the PowerPoint presentation. “Right Click” on a text box in the slide where you want to insert the LaTex equation. Then click on the “Keep Source Formatting” option in the “Paste Options” section of the right-click menu.

Alternatively, you can press the “Ctrl+V” keys on your keyboard to paste the equation into the text box.

2.2 Method 2: Inserting as Image

To insert a LaTex equation in Microsoft PowerPoint, you can simply add it as an image. All you have to do is follow the 4 quick steps.

Step-1: Click on the “Download PDF” option

The first step is to download the LaTex output as a PDF file. To do so, click on the “Download PDF” option in your LaTex file.

Step-2: Press the “Win+Shift+S” keys on your keyboard

The next step is to open the PDF file. Then press the “Win+Shift+S” keys on your keyboard to take a screenshot of the LaTex equation.

Step-3: Open the PowerPoint slide

Now you have to open the PowerPoint presentation. In the presentation, click on the slide where you want to insert the LaTex equation as an image.

Step-4: Click on the “Paste” option

Finally, all you have to do is “Right Click” on the slide. In the “Paste Options” section of the right-click menu, click on either the “Paste” option or the “Picture” option.

You can alternatively press the “Ctrl+V” keys on your keyboard to paste the LaTex equation as an image.

2.3 Method 3: Using Microsoft Word

The equation toolbar in Microsoft Word supports LaTex equations. You can insert a LaTex equation in Word and paste it into a text box in Microsoft PowerPoint. All you have to do is follow the 9 simple steps.

The first step is to open a Microsoft Word document. In the menu ribbon located at the top of the screen, click on the “Insert” tab to open the “Insert” menu.

Step-2: Click on the “Equation” button

In the “Symbols” group of the “Insert” menu, click on the “Equation” button. It will open an equation box in the document.

The next step is to click on the equation box in the document to select it. Then click on the “Equation” tab in the menu ribbon to open the “Equation” toolbar.

Step-4: Click on the “LaTex” option

In the “Conversions” group of the “Equation” toolbar, click on the “LaTex” option. Now you can enter LaTex codes in the equation box.

Step-5: Type in the LaTex equation

In the equation box, you can now type in the LaTex equation. Then all you have to do is press the “Enter” key on your keyboard to convert the LaTex code to the equation.

Step-6: Click on the “Copy” option

The next step is to “Double Click” on the equation box to select the LaTex equation. Then “Right Click” on the equation and select the “Copy” option from the right-click menu.

Alternatively, you can press the “Ctrl+C” keys on your keyboard to copy the equation.

Step-7: Click on the “Insert” menu

Now you can insert the LaTex equation into a PowerPoint slide. In the PowerPoint presentation, click on the “Insert” menu from the menu ribbon located at the top of the screen.

Step-8: Click on the “Text Box” option

In the “Text” group of the “Insert” menu, click on the “Text Box” option. Now you can draw the text box in the presentation slide where you want to add the equation.

Step-9: Click on the “Keep Source Formatting” option

Finally, you can paste the LaTex equation into the PowerPoint slide. To do so, “Right Click” on the text box. Then click on the “Keep Source Formatting” option under the “Paste Options” section in the right-click menu.

You can alternatively press the “Ctrl+V” keys on your keyboard to paste the LaTex equation.

• Behind the Scenes

How to Make a Presentation in LaTeX

December 7, 2016 Trudy Firestone 5 Comments

When I was tasked with creating a presentation to share with my co-workers at our weekly tech talk, I chose to use LaTeX. While I briefly considered other tools, like Google Slides or PowerPoint, using LaTeX allowed me to easily separate the styling from my content and create my own theme that I could reuse for all future presentations at Lucid.

What? LaTeX for Presentations?

LaTeX is a typesetting and document creation tool that is often used for creating academic articles due to its ability to display mathematical equations. Beyond that, it has many other capabilities due to a large amount of packages, such as Forest, which I used for laying out sentence trees in a college Linguistics class. One such package, Beamer , allows you to create presentations. While Beamer lacks the simple click and drag functionality of a GUI tool in creating presentations, it makes up for it by automating a large portion of the stylistic work—as long as you like the default styles or are willing to write your own—and offering all the mathematical equations, graphs, and other tools available in LaTeX.

A sample Beamer document:

The Beamer commands are straightforward, and the flow of the presentation is easier to follow than it is in a GUI tool. While you could split the styling from the market using html and css, I enjoy using the Beamer package due to its concise creation of slides. Looking at a LaTeX file for a Beamer presentation is almost like looking at an outline which makes it more closely connected to the content the presentation is trying to convey. Unfortunately, I don’t like the default theme…or any of the other themes .

After lots of searching, however, I was able to create my own theme, lucid. Then, just by uncommenting \usetheme{lucid} , I was able to create a presentation I was pleased with. Only a few weeks ago, I was able to reuse the theme and create a new presentation with all the custom styling that I wanted in much less time than a GUI tool would have required to replicate my original theme.

Building Your Own Beamer Theme

While it’s easy to find documentation on creating a presentation using Beamer , it’s more difficult to locate documentation on building a Beamer theme. Therefore, I’m going to walk through creating a simple Beamer theme with its own title page, header and footer, and styled lists.

The first step in creating a Beamer theme is creating the following four files where “lucid” is the name of our new theme:

• beamerinnerthemelucid.sty
• beamerouterthemelucid.sty
• beamercolorthemelucid.sty
• beamerthemelucid.sty

While it’s not necessary to separate these into four files, it follows the pattern of Beamer’s own themes which allow for mixing and matching different parts of the theme. For instance, if we wanted to use the albatross color theme with the default theme we could replace \usetheme{lucid} in the above sample file like this:

And the output pdf would consist of this:

The three parts of a theme are:

• Inner: Defines the appearance of any items that make up the slides central content, e.g., lists or the title on the title page
• Outer: Defines the appearance of the chrome of the slide, e.g., the title and footer of each slide
• Color: Defines the colors used in various parts of the theme, e.g.,the color for frame titles or the background color

The final file, beamerthemelucid.sty, simply exists to combine all the parts of the theme into the main theme so it can be used without specifying each part of the theme.

beamerthemelucid.sty:

The change to presentation mode at the beginning of the file is added so that the .sty file will match the mode of the presentation .tex file. Beamer automatically converts all files with its document class to presentation mode. The rest of the file simply sets all the portions of the theme to the new lucid theme and then returns the file to the normal mode. Each of the .sty files used to create the theme needs to be put in presentation mode in the same way.

Right now, the theme doesn’t actually change anything. Everything is still using the default theme because we haven’t defined any new styles. Let’s start with the title page. Because the title is part of the inner content of the title page, the definition for its style goes into beamerinnerthemelucid.sty.

I want a title page that’s centered vertically and horizontally like the one in the default theme, but with a bigger font, a different color, and no date. So, let’s add the following to beamerinnerthemelucid.sty between the mode changes:

The \defbeamertemplate command creates a new template where the first argument is the mode, * in this case, the second argument is what the template is for, and the third argument is the name of the new template. To access the template elsewhere, the given name is used, in this case “lucid.” The final part of \defbeamertemplate is where the actual template is defined using arbitrary LaTeX code. In this case, we use common commands for centering and accessed the title and subtitle via \inserttitle and \insertsubtitle . To get the correct colors, we use \usebeamercolor which fetches the correct colors from the color theme based on the element name given, i.e., the name of the color. Similarly, \usebeamerfont fetches the correct font from the font theme, so that you can specify the font separately.

However, the color and the font remain unchanged, so we need to edit the color theme file next. I want white text on a dark background, so we need to change the background color first.

After adding these commands in beamercolorthemelucid.sty, the title page looks just about the way I want it. The background is gray, and the title and subtitle are in a new size and color. However, Beamer’s default links are still in the bottom right hand corner. To remove them, we add the following line to beamerouterthemelucid.sty because the footer is part of the outer theme.

Like \defbeamertemplate , \setbeamertemplate can be used to define a new template. The element that uses the template is immediately set to use the new template rather than being set separately. In this case, the navigation symbols element is set to empty.

Now that the title page looks just the way I want it to, we can move on to the content slides. While they already have the correct background color and are correctly lacking the navigation symbols in the footer, the title and subtitle are the wrong color and lack style.

Because the frame title is part of the outer theme, we add the following to beamerouterthemelucid.sty:

In addition to the now familiar Beamer commands, we use an if statement to differentiate between the cases of when there is and isn’t a subtitle, and we make use of a new package, tikz, which allows the user to create drawings in LaTeX. By using it in the template for the frametitle, we’ve added a rectangle to each frame title in the presentation. We set the color of the rectangle with the Beamer color frametitle-left which the command \usebeamercolor[fg]{frametitle-left} adds to the environment.

The colors and fonts are correctly reading from beamercolorthemelucid.sty, but it hasn’t been updated, so that’s the next step.

The content of the slides is still in the default style, so we turn to beamerinnerthemelucid.sty to modify the template for lists.

Just as \setbeamertemplate can be used to define a new template that is immediately applied, it can also be used to set a template defined by \defbeamertemplate earlier. square is defined by default in the beamer package, and it makes the bullets in an unordered list square.

To change the colors of content and the list items, we update beamercolortheme.sty again.

The last thing missing from our theme is a new footer. We need to add a page number and logo to each page.

Adding the above to beamerouterthemelucid.sty splits the footer in half, putting the page number out of the total number of pages on one side and a logo on the other. lucidsoftware-logo.png has to be included in the same directory for it to compile correctly. The if statement removes the page number from the first page.

Finally, we add the color for the page number to beamercolorthemelucid.sty:

Creating your own LaTeX theme allows for complete customizability, something you have to work very hard to achieve in more conventional presentational tools. It also makes it trivial to reuse the theme, avoiding wasted effort.

Additional References:

• Another Theme Example

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Live editing html and css with chrome devtools, agile documentation: keeping your team in sync in an agile world, 5 smart strategies to increasing productivity in the workplace.

Was doing just that in the ’80s with DCF and Generalised Markup Language.

Styles were called “profiles”. You could roll your own, tailor an existing style or buy one.

The same base document could be formatted for a book, presentation or display.

Likely still used in producing IBM manuals.

So, have you uploaded your theme on CTAN? That’s the TeX-way to share 🙂

Thanks a lot This article helped me a lot to prepare my communication for this week (Stil working on it) Much thanks <3

Thank you a million times, i had a very very incredible experience with your tutorial. I made my own theme and i love it 🙂 I’m going to make a video on YouTube for this beautiful simplistic tex presentation solution. I’ll definitely link to your great tutorial there.

I do agree with all the ideas you have introduced on your post.

They’re really convincing and wll definitely work. Nonetheless, the posts are too brief for starters. May you please lengthen them a bit from subsequent time? Thanks for the post.

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A Free LaTeX Add-In for PowerPoint on Windows and Mac

IguanaTex is a PowerPoint add-in which allows you to insert LaTeX equations into your PowerPoint presentation. It is distributed completely for free, along with its source code.

If you know how to use LaTeX, it is very easy to use IguanaTex. Select New LaTeX display from the IguanaTex tab of the ribbon, and you will get a dialog box where you can type your equation:

Type any valid LaTeX code, and click on Generate. IguanaTex will compile your code into LaTeX, generate an image from it and insert it into PowerPoint.

Need to change something in the equation? Just select the image, then click on Edit LaTeX display in the IguanaTex tab of the ribbon, and the IguanaTex dialog will re-appear so you can edit the LaTeX code.

Generated bitmap displays are ordinary PowerPoint images, and vector displays are PowerPoint shapes. They can be grouped, animated, rotated, moved, resized, etc. Further editing of the equation will preserve all these changes.

To make similar changes to multiple displays (e.g., changing LaTeX engine, size, DPI, vector/bitmap, transparency, and simple text search & replace), select multiple displays or even multiple slides, and use "Regenerate selection" to apply all changes at once.

Both the image and LaTeX code are saved with the presentation: you can display your presentation on any computer, even those without IguanaTex. Of course, equations can only be edited if you install IguanaTex.

Former TexPoint users, rejoice: you can now edit with IguanaTex (v1.40+) your TexPoint displays, which will be automatically converted to IguanaTex format. You can either edit a TexPoint display as a normal IguanaTex one as described above, or just select one or more TexPoint displays (or the slides that contain them) and click on "Regenerate selection" to convert them to IguanaTex format.

System Requirements

• OS: Windows 2000 or later (32- or 64-bit).
• PowerPoint: IguanaTex has been tested with PowerPoint 2003, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019 (both 32 and 64 bit), Office 365. It is likely to also work in PowerPoint 2000 and 2007.
• LaTeX (can be downloaded from MiKTeX or TeX Live )
• (Optional but highly recommended for anything but most basic usage): GhostScript and ImageMagick , required to use pdflatex/xelatex/lualatex.
• (Optional): TeX2img , used for vector graphics output via EMF ( Download ). Note that vector graphics output via SVG is now recommended if you have Office 2019 or 365.
• OS / PowerPoint: Any Mac OS with Powerpoint 2019 or Office 365, Silicon or Intel.
• LaTeX: I highly recommend using MacTeX , as it comes with several other tools that IguanaTex uses (ghostscript, dvisvgm, dvipdfmx, ...)

Download & Installation

The current version, for Windows and Mac, is 1.60.3 (October 13, 2023) and can be downloaded from Github . Here is the changelog . Please follow the installation instructions .

Older, Windows-only versions can be downloaded from this website . After downloading, follow the instructions on the download page to load the add-in in PowerPoint.

Stay up to date: IguanaTex Google Group

To be informed of the release of new versions, you can subscribe to the IguanaTex Google Group .

Tips, Bugs, and Known Issues

If you are having trouble installing or using IguanaTex, please see the frequently asked questions .

Source code on Github

The source code for all versions of IguanaTex is available on Github .

Show your appreciation by giving to the Union of Concerned Scientists

IguanaTex is free, but if you like it and would like to show your appreciation, I encourage you to donate to the non-profit Union of Concerned Scientists through my IguanaTex Fundraising Page . $816 raised on my previous fund should be added to the amount displayed here. (Note: absolutely nothing goes to me)

The Union of Concerned Scientists "puts rigorous, independent science to work to solve our planet's most pressing problems", first and foremost global warming.

Let's all be concerned scientists!

Info and Credits

The current version of IguanaTex is maintained by Jonathan Le Roux , in collaboration with Tsung-Ju Chiang for the Mac version. It was expanded from the original version, written by Zvika Ben-Haim , originally to add support for groups and formatting, then later many more features. See the changelog for details.

Special thanks to Hammad M, Greg Anderson, Amir Bin Sulaiman, Michael Bußler, Evan Cooch, Eran Hof, Ahiteme Nicodeme Houndonougbo, Moshe Mishali, Thomas Stehle, Wei Sun, Henrik Zimmer, Malte von Scheven, Peter Ploß, Lasse Tidemann, Soren Wrang, Peter Koch, Mitchell Wand, Moshe Idan, Stephan Schedler, Mike West, Tag, Martin Bruehl, Evan Cooch, Robert Sattler, Bill White, Riccardo spica, Utophii Logos, Ivor Bowden, Chuan Li, Arnaud Woiselle, Christoph Naumann, Jinyu Lee, Ralf Tautenhahn, Andreas Herkle, archerc, Monroe Weber-Shirk, Arrigo Benedetti, and Ruichen Jiang for help with programming, debugging, and suggestions.

A LaTeX add-in for PowerPoint - my father’s day project

Jeremy Howard

June 17, 2019

For creating presentations there’s a lot of features in PowerPoint that are hard to beat. So it’s not surprising that it’s a very popular tool—I see a lot of folks presenting PowerPoint presentations at machine learning talks that I attend. However, for equation-heavy academic publishing, many scientists prefer LaTeX. There are many reasons for this, but one key one is that LaTeX provides great support for creating equations. Whilst PowerPoint has an equation editor of its own, it is not a great match for LaTeX-using scientists, because:

• It’s a pain to have to re-enter all your equations again into a new tool
• The GUI approach takes a lot longer to enter equations compared to LaTeX (once you’ve learned LaTeX’s syntax). Although Microsoft Office equations have great keyboard support too, if you know where to look.

To avoid this problem, most scientists I’ve seen tend to copy screenshots from the LaTeX output of their papers, and paste them into PowerPoint. However this has it’s own problems, for instance:

• The fonts are unlikely to match up correctly
• It’s hard to resize the text to match the equation picture, and visa versa
• The bitmap screenshot is low resolution, so doesn’t print well
• The equations don’t reflow with the text, so have to be manually placed
• Alignment commands don’t work, so alignment has to be done manually
• …and so forth

If you’re one of those people looking to include LaTeX equations in PowerPoint, I’ve got some good news for you—have a look at this:

That’s right, this picture shows a real, editable, resizable, full-resolution equation in PowerPoint, created using LaTeX syntax! What’s the secret? Well… the secret is that Microsoft has actually included this functionality in PowerPoint for us, but they just totally butchered the front-end implementation, and failed to document it properly! So for my father’s day 2019 project, I created a little add-in to try to address that. Here’s how to use it.

How to use LaTeX in PowerPoint

To use LaTeX in PowerPoint you have to complete a few setup steps first. ( I’ve only tested this on the latest Office 365 on Windows 10 .)

• Download the latex PowerPoint add-in from here
• Put the add-in file somewhere convenient, and then add it to PowerPoint by clicking File then Options , clicking Add-ins in the options list on the left, then choose PowerPoint Add-ins from the Manage drop-down, and click Go . Choose Add New in the dialog box that pops up, and select the latex.ppam file you downloaded
• Click Enable Macros in the security notice that pops up.

You’ll now find that there’s a new LaTeX tab in your ribbon. Each time you open a new PowerPoint session you’ll need to switch it to “LaTeX mode”. To do so, click inside a text box (so the cursor is flashing) and choose Enable LaTeX in the LaTeX tab. This file will now be in LaTeX mode until you close and reopen PowerPoint. This is necessary to use the Input LaTeX button (see next paragraph), which is the only way I suggest to try to enter or edit LaTeX in PowerPoint.

Now you are ready to insert your equation. Click inside a text box, and ensure the cursor is at the end of the text box (currently the macro only works if you’re at the end of the selected text box). Now click Input LaTeX in the LaTeX tab, and paste your equation into the input box that pops up (you can also type into it, of course, although I’d suggest you type your LaTeX into a regular text editor and paste it to PowerPoint from there, so you have a convenient source for all your equations’ LaTeX source). That’s it! The equation is now a regular PowerPoint equation, so when you click inside it, everything is editable, and you can also select the equation and change its font size, color, etc.

You can even select the equation and add Wordart effects to it, if you want to really ham things up!…

Additional customization and tips

You can edit the equation using the normal Microsoft Office equation ribbon commands. If you want to see and edit the LaTeX source again, click Linear on the Equation ribbon. However, don’t edit this LaTeX directly in PowerPoint—it will mangle it as you type! Instead, copy it into an external editor and change it there, then create a new equation with the Input LaTeX command as above. (This is why it’s easier to simply keep all your original LaTeX source in a plain text file, if you’re not editing the equations using the equation ribbon.)

Apparently Microsoft hates productivity, or at least that’s the only reason I can think of that they decided to remove one of the most important features for productivity: the ability to customize and add keyboard shortcuts. So if you want to add a keyboard shortcut for Input LaTeX , you instead have to right-click on the Input LaTeX button in the ribbon, and choose Add to Quick Access Toolbar . You’ll now see an extra button in the very top left of your window (that’s the Quick Access Toolbar ). Press and release Alt , and you’ll be able to see what numeric shortcut has been assigned to that button. Press and release Alt again to remove the shortcut overlays. Now you’re ready to use the keyboard shortcut. Click inside a textbox as before (at the end of it) and, while holding down Alt , press the number you noted down before. You should see the input box appear.

If you want to contribute improvements to the add-in, or just see how it works, head over to the latex-ppt repo. latex.pptm contains the macro, so you can edit it and try out your changes there. If you just want to see the (tiny amount) of code, I’ve popped it in the macros.bas file. My macros are very basic right now, so PRs with improvements and fixes are most welcome!

How this works

Microsoft have actually added all the necessary stuff to make LaTeX work in PowerPoint already. They’ve just not provided any UI for it, or documentation. And the editor doesn’t work. So I created a little add-in to automate the use of the features described below.

Microsoft Office supports a rather nifty plain text equation format called UnicodeMath , which used to be called Linear format . That’s what the PowerPoint ribbon still calls it, in fact. In the Equation ribbon you can click the Linear format button to type UnicodeMath directly. You can switch the linear format mode to LaTeX by typing Unicode character “Ⓣ” into an equation. Apparently that’s been in Microsoft Office for a while, but it’s only recently that the developer actually got around to writing it down . This post includes some additional useful information:

The LaTeX option supports all TeX control words appearing in Appendix B of the UnicodeMath spec. That includes many math operators, Greek letters, and various other symbols. The verbose LaTeX notations like \begin{equation} and \begin{matrix} aren’t supported, but the more concise TeX notations are supported, such as and . Fractions can be entered in the LaTeX form or in the TeX form {……}. is implied if the math zone fills the hard/soft paragraph and currently it can’t be turned on in inline math zones. Unicode math alphanumerics can be entered using control words like .

I hope you find this add-in and documentation useful! Many thanks to Murray Sargent of Microsoft who built the functionality in Office that this add-in uses.

How to make slides in LaTex

The beamer class.

The beamer class is a LaTeX class that allows you to create a beamer presentation. It can also be used to create slides. It behaves similarly to other packages like Prosper, but has the advantage that it works together directly with pdflatex, but also with dvips.

The Latex Beamer Class Homepage  provides with the steps to create a beamer presentation and some examples

Beamer Tutorial - MIT  (pdf)

LaTeX Beamer Templates

LaTeX Beamer Video

Powerdot is a presentation class for LaTeX that allows for the quick and easy development of professional presentations. It comes with many tools that enhance presentations and aid the presenter. Examples are automatic overlays, personal notes and a handout mode. To view a presentation, DVI, PS or PDF output can be used. A powerful template system is available to easily develop new styles.

CTAN  provides additional details on Powerdot.

Quick Tutorial on Powerdot for slide making

Note:  These softwares are not a part of the default installation for LaTeX. The software downloads can be obtained from the respective homepages. For further assistance with the installation on your machine please contact  computer support

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LaTeX vs Powerpoint for presentations [closed]

I had been wondering what are the advantages of using LaTeX (specifically the presentation packages: beamer or texpower ) over powerpoint for presentations. The advantages which I have seen on the web point to the fact that LaTeX can output PDFs which are platform independent, but even powerpoint can do that. Another point being that you don't need to pay for using LaTeX.

Apart from that why would I want to use LaTeX for doing presentations?

• microsoft-powerpoint
• presentations

• 2 I believe [Beamer]( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beamer_(LaTeX)) is what you're looking for to use LaTeX for presentations. Can't help you much with a versus comparison since I've never used it, but there are a few good introductions to Beamer out there. –  fideli Dec 13, 2010 at 19:23
• I tried to show pros and cons below. How can I argue against this "put on hold" in superuser? –  Dieter.Wilhelm Apr 22, 2017 at 6:26

5 Answers 5

In a single analogy :

LaTeX+beamer:PowerPoint::LaTeX:Word

I use beamer every day for my classes (I teach math) and couldn't imagine using PowerPoint/Keynote the same way. But for conference talks or opening-day presentations which are not rich in mathematical notation I like Keynote.

• 1 I don't get the notation of this answer. Could someone explain it? –  Calculus Knight Jan 13, 2017 at 14:06
• 6 @CalculusKnight: Analogies are used to explain relationships. The single colon means "is to" and the double colon means "as." So a longer version of what I wrote would be "LaTeX (plus beamer) is to PowerPoint as regular LaTeX is to Word". –  Matthew Leingang Jan 13, 2017 at 15:41
• I would be happy to hear about the advantages you find in LaTex of word. I write a lot of math in word using the equation editor, where I use latex syntax, and have the advantage of of the gui of word. –  Cantor Mar 14, 2022 at 19:08
• @Cantor the LaTeX vs. Word debate is old indeed, and I don't have too much to add. One thing I like about my LaTeX workflow is that I can have many documents contained in a single file: lecture slides, handouts, personal lecture notes, worksheets, and solutions. –  Matthew Leingang Mar 17, 2022 at 19:15

I'm using LaTeX-beamer-PDF because of its comprehensive and partly unique features:

• Math: With LaTeX the best mathematical layout is available
• Sketches: With the tikz package any technical sketch or diagram is possible
• Graphs: With the pgfplots package font consistent, complex graphs with overlay effects are possible
• Videos , Animations and 3D objects: With the media9 package even embedding of 3D objects, animations and youtube videos into PDFs is possible
• Overlay effects: With beamer you can overlay even between formulas and tables
• Hyper linking: With beamer you can link and connect anything, formulas, table of contents
• Layout: Total control of any layout aspect (theoretically)
• Self-contained: All information, all layout controls in one single text file and all media content embedded in one single output file
• Standardised: With the PDF output format you are independent of proprietary viewer formats and software versions! (I started with beamer after I was forced to present my PowerPointless presentation with a different PowerPoint version: Some formatting changed and my animations didn't run!)
• Typography: The default beamer layouts and font selections guide you in good presentation techniques (not too cramped, etc.)
• Costs: Free of them!

But I'd also like to mention possible disadvantages of Latex-beamer , compared to WYSIWYG solutions, for example, Libre Office's Impress or PowerlessPoint ;-)

• The learning curve is steeper, but excellent tutorials and user communities ( TeXamples e.g.) are available
• Command syntax is harder to memorise and type, but the LaTeX and beamer manuals and references are excellent and widely available.
• Image positioning remains somewhat cumbersome :-/
• A cold, sterile and a bit too perfect impression of your presentation might ensue
• Often corporate presentation templates are not available for LaTeX (but it's worth to redo them in beamer ;-) )
• Sharing with WYSIWYG content is difficult, the majority in business environment is using PowerPoint :-(
• Expressing oneself in a mark-up language like LaTeX compared to WYSIWYG is brain dependent and might be more difficult for some humans. ;-)

By the way, I'm using now org-mode to write my beamer presentations (and anything else textual) to save myself some of the cumbersome aspects of the LaTeX language among other advantages.

By, by the way, lately I discovered Reveal , the html presentation framework. Which is also looking interesting when considering to publish the presentation on the web.

I think that the answer mostly depends on what is going to appear in your presentation.

If you need a lot of math, please use beamer.

If you have Images and you need to make some order on the space you have on each slide, I think PPT is more powerful. The reason is that it often happens that your images on the slide are quite larger than you expected and you need to resize them. With PPt this process is straightforward, with beamer it's very demanding (compiling, checking, re-compiling....).

I've never used Keynotes, I'm sorry.

OK, I did a bit more googling and found couple of links with a good comparison:

• Keynote Vs Powerpoint vs Beamer
• LaTeX and PowerPoint presentations

Main takeaway being if you want to have math symbols in your presentations, use LaTeX (Beamer).

LaTeX is a typesetting computer language. To use it powerfully, you have to really learn it. The learning curve can be steep, particularly if you've been primarily a casual user. It's also considered a markup language. If you've had experience with html, you may find it easier to use. If you are putting together presentations professionally (as it's in your job description), say as a junior analyst or professor, you'll find it to be very valuable. If you're a casual user, or a student doing a project here or there, unless you're doing it for the learning experience, it's much easier to use PowerPoint (or a free alternative: OpenOffice.org's Impress).

That said, there are many templates and examples that can make the presentation creation process much easier.

In summary, it really depends on your intentions and long term goals. I recommend Beamer for a long term learning goal, if it fits into your learning desires or professional needs. As a lifetime learner, I want to learn it myself, and I've made some steps along the way to learning it, but it's on the backburner for the time being.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged microsoft-powerpoint latex presentations beamer .

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Presentations

Presentations, otherwise known as seminars, talks or lectures, are given to an audience with the purpose of sharing information with a group of people. This may be at an academic conference, a business meeting or even a project progress update. Since LaTeX produces PDFs, you simply need to open the presentation PDF in full screen mode in your PDF viewer to give the presentation.

Beamer Presentation

This presentation template uses the well-known beamer class and shows how effortless making presentations using LaTeX can be. The template contains extensive commenting which lets you customize your presentation easily, be it to change the layout theme, colors, fonts, font size, text alignment or more. It also features many example slides for virtually any presentation element you may need.

• View Template Information

Focus Presentation

This template creates modern presentation slides using the beamer class. The minimalist design lets you quickly enter your content and spend time honing your message rather than wasting time in presentation software. The template includes examples of many slide types which should cover most use cases as well as different ways of putting in your content no matter what it is and how you want to emphasize it.

Fancyslides Presentation

This presentation template uses the Fancyslides class which builds on top of the well-known beamer class to give it a modern and concise design. The template is very minimalist with large font sizes and little space for text and would thus be suited for popular presentations by confident speakers. It makes extensive use of background images for slides to provide a strong visual counterpart to the verbal presentation. Content within the presentation is housed within translucent colored circles or rectangles. The former are used for main points or section delineations while the latter are used for larger blocks of text or data slides. Several predefined color options are present within the template and you can also define your own.

LaTeX Templates Information

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