Professional, Polished, Presentable

Making great slides with xaringan

Workshop

A useR!2021 tutorial about making great slides with xaringan.

Author

Garrick Aden-Buie and Silvia Canelón

Published

July 7, 2021

Abstract

The xaringan package brings professional, impressive, and visually appealing slides to the powerful R Markdown ecosystem. Through our hands-on tutorial, you will learn how to design highly effective slides that support presentations for teaching and reporting alike. Over three hours, you will learn how to create an accessible baseline design that matches your institution or organization’s style guide. Together we’ll explore the basics of CSS—the design language of the internet—and how we can leverage CSS to produce elegant slides for effective communication.

Why xaringan?

Effective communication is the keystone of impactful data science. Whether teaching data-related skills or reporting the latest modelling results, by and large R users are expected to communicate highly complex topics to students and stakeholders. Furthermore, our computational data work requires that our presentations and reports are both reproducible when we need to recreate today’s work in the future, as well as adaptable when tomorrow’s data changes today’s results. And, not least of all, effective communication demands that our medium of communication is accessible to all, regardless of socio-economic status, activity limitations or disability.

Creating presentations with the xaringan package embodies all of these requisite skills: built on the literate programming markdown syntax familiar to users of R Markdown, it produces reproducible HTML slides that enable effective, accessible communication across sectors, disciplines, and experiences.

Along the way, working with xaringan fosters a level of web literacy that is immensely useful in many other venues of online communication such as with web-based documents and apps created using R Markdown and Shiny.