Beamer presentations in LaTeX

One frame per idea

A Beamer document is an article where sections became slides. Start with the beamer class and put each idea on its own frame:

\documentclass{beamer} \begin{document} \begin{frame}{Results} Our method is twice as fast. \end{frame} \end{document}

Theme and color

Pick one theme and one color theme in the preamble and stop there: \usetheme{Madrid} with \usecolortheme{default} looks professional out of the box. Custom-styled decks age badly; content does not.

Overlays

Reveal bullet points step by step with overlay specifications instead of duplicating frames: \item<1-> shows from slide one on, \only<2>{...} shows content on slide two only. Fewer frames, same talk.

Two columns that align

Side-by-side content goes in columns, not tables or minipages: widths like .48\textwidth with a small gap survive theme changes, while hand-tuned minipages break on the first font switch. Top-align both columns explicitly, or uneven content drifts apart slide by slide.

Handouts from the same source

One source, two outputs: compile with the handout option to flatten overlays into a printable article version. Same file, no duplicated maintenance — the audience gets slides, the absent get the handout, and both stay in sync because they are the same document.