Previous steps

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Context

Slide presentations are another important format for communicating the results of coral reef monitoring. Using rmarkdown to render a slide presentation follows a similar format to the generation of a static report, with minor differences in the *.Rmd header, how to annotate the beginning of slides and sequential text.

There are a number of R packages that are able to generate slide presentations. This training course uses revealjs as an example and the basic technique can be applied to other packages.

This training material provides the basic steps for setting up a *.Rmd document for creating a slide presentation.

Basic set up

Course participants will want to make sure they have the revealjs package installed for this exercise. This can be accomplished by typing install.packages("revealjs") in the console.

For setting up a presentation, it is sometime useful to create a separate folder in the reporting folder of the project. This helps keeps the presentation media and supporting styles files (e.g. *.css, *.yaml) together and easier to locate during rendering. For example, for the documentation presentation:

For creating a *.Rmd document for a presentation, the key difference is in the output: section of the header, where revealjs::revealjs_presentation is included:

New slides are indicated by two # symbols followed by the slide title (i.e. purple notation above). Sequential text is noted by a > + and sequential bullets by > * (note the four spaces in the figure above).

Slide presentation sections can be noted by a single #, similar to a higher-level heading in the creation of a static document. In revealjs slides that follow this heaing will be organised below the header and accessed by pressing the “down” arrow. This functionality is useful in more complex presentations where organisation into these headers can assist in organising presentation materials relevant to coral reef monitoring (e.g. sections on Study sites, Benthos, Fishes, et cetera).,

New slides with images can be created by the double # symbols followed by the notation to images (i.e. ![](location/of/image.png): orange text in image above).

The output of revealjs can be opened in any browser and provides a simple, clean presentation with elegant transitions between slides:

The utility of including the creation of dissemination outputs (e.g. reports, slide presentations) with markdown is that it keeps the raw data, cleaning, analysis and figure production in a single, version-controlled repository which can produce repeatable results. So, learning the use of markdown to create various types of dissemination materials is an extremely beneficial for the knowledge management of coral reef monitoring projects.

Next steps

Now that we have the basics for creating a slide presentation, we will see how the basic rmarkdown annotation can be used to document a coral reef monitoring data project in a Github wiki.