Getting Started with Beamer: Tips and Tricks for LaTeX Presentations

This post provides a guide to getting started with Beamer, a popular LaTeX package for preparing slide presentations. The post: (a) Lists some of the benefits of Beamer in comparison to PowerPoint; (b) Links to tutorials and suggestions for learning Beamer for both people who do and do not know LaTeX; (c) Documents problems that I encountered when learning to use Beamer and the solutions that I developed to overcome them.

Simple Beamer Template for Getting Started and Reducing Typing

For those who don't already know, Beamer is a useful package in LaTeX for preparing slide presentations. I have a Beamer template of preamble and slide templates. I found having a template was useful: (a) when first learning Beamer commands, and (b) in order to save typing. Thus, this post shares and explains the template in case it was of interest to others. It includes both my standard preamble and templates for individual slides. It is designed so that it is easy to compile both a presentation and a 2 x 2 handout.