How to Create Lightweight Slideshow Presentations
Slideshow presentations are a necessary and indispensable part of corporate and academic life thanks to their ability to help you plan and structure the dissemination of information to your audience.
But flashy graphics and transition effects can be distracting from the main information, with your effort to improve your flashy PowerPoint well spent elsewhere.
Slides is a terminal-based presentation tool for Linux that processes Markdown files – helping you create and present slideshows without ever leaving your terminal!
Slideshows Are an Essential Business Tool
When you need to provide important data or instructions to a group of disgruntled and disinterested employees or students at 9 a.m. on a Monday, nothing does better than presenting a slide show.
It requires minimal audience participation, and allows you to organize your presentation in a structured, logical manner. Unlike a video presentation, it’s easy to create breakpoints in a slideshow, so you can test your audience’s engagement as they yawn, stretch, and doodle on notepads.
You can enhance the value of slideshows with Handouts—allowing slides to be digested internally after the show is over.
Why use terminal-based slideshows
A major drawback of traditional slideshows created using programs such as Microsoft PowerPoint or Google Slides is that they can be distracting to both the audience and the author.
When putting together a slide show, it’s tempting to use background images to liven up otherwise dull text. You can spend hours deciding on the right font family, weight, and placement.
Is it better to have the first slide gradually fade into the second, or have the entire presentation progress through zooms, wipes, flips, and dissolving effects?
The result is often a mess of disorganization that takes too long to build up and irritates the audience.
Slide helps you avoid all these problems. The font is your terminal font, no distracting transitions, and it’s possible to display images if your terminal supports them, it’s not a primary feature.
Best of all, you create your slideshow using Markdown, a straightforward, easy-to-understand markup language that can be mastered rapidly to create beautiful and simply formatted text on Linux.
how to install slide on linux
Slides is written in Google’s Go language, and you will need to have Go installed on your system before you can begin.
You are now ready to create a slideshow.
Use Slides to Create Awesome Terminal Slideshows
Creating a terminal-based slideshow with Slides is simple, and each of the instructions for running the show can be contained in a single Markdown file. Here’s why you should learn Markdown even if you’re not using Slides.
Begin typing the content of your first slide into the file, remembering to use standard Markdown conventions. Take advantage of standard Markdown features like headings, bold and italic text, bullet points, numbered lists, tables, code blocks, quotes, and more!
Slides also allows you to access some programmatic hi-jink and insert code blocks into your Markdown. Slide supports a wide variety of languages including JavaScript, Bash, Python, Elixir, and Go.
A code block is bracketed by two sets of three backticks, with the language name immediately following the first set.
additional slide options
As the slides are written in Markdown, you can use front case at the beginning of the file to set additional configuration options.
Using “Author” allows you to set the author for the slideshow. By default, the author is set to the current user.
With “Date”, you can set the date. By default, this will be set to today’s date.
brush up on your public speaking
Creating a beautiful, concise and engaging slideshow presentation can go a long way towards getting your message across. Nevertheless, your preparation will be for naught if your delivery skills are not up to scratch.
Learn how to articulate your ideas the right way, and brush up on the best ways to confidently address an audience so your message gets across perfectly.