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The Ultimate List of Markdown Presentation Tools

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Creating presentations in Markdown is a bit time-consuming. However, there are a couple of excellent tools out there that are explicitly used for creating presentations with Markdown.

Marp, Slippr, and Cafe-Pitch are the most used tools for Markdown Presentations. All three are GitHub Projects.

We have compiled a complete listicle of numerous tools to help you better understand Markdown Presentation Tools.

Top 23 Markdown Presentation Tools

The 23 top-notch tools for creating slide decks with Markdown are:

Markdown-slides

Marp is a creative tool for preparing beautiful slide decks or presentations. Also known as the Markdown representation ecosystem, Marp has been one of the most reliable and used tools for generating presentations with Markdown. It is intimidating at first but believe it or not, within a few days, you can get a good grasp of this tool.

If you know how to write documents in Markdown, you can use this tool without any hassle. Because with Marp, you only need to focus on writing your text document in Markdown.

Slippr is an electron-based app that’s used to create Markdown presentations. With Slippr, you can easily create attractive presentations within a few seconds. To install this tool, you can head over to yarnpkg.com. You can also directly run Slippr using.

yarn run start

There are numerous functions available in Slippr to help you customize the most beautiful slides. You can adjust the functions according to your desires on all three pages, the editing, slides, and the timer page.

CafePitch is another electron built tool for creating presentations with Markdown. You can install and run CafePitch via

npm install -g cafe-pitch.

It is a GitHub project, and it might be a bit daunting for you to understand its usage. However, you can get a better understanding of setting up and testing the tool here .

Reveal.js is one of the most innovative and simplest open-source tools out there to create Markdown presentations. This HTML presentation framework allows anyone to design visually appealing and eye-catchy presentations within a few minutes.

Reveal.js has many excellent features such as nested slides, auto-animate, syntax-highlighted code, pdf export, etc. With Reveal.js, you can perform all functions in your presentation that you can do on the web, as it’s an open-source HTML presentation framework.

Using MDX would be much easier for you if you know how to write code in Markdown Documents. MDX is a simple format through which you can write your documents in Markdown.

It has many features that can make your presentation look more than just a piece of text. MDX lets people import visual components such as charts and other designs. These can be embedded with the content in Markdown.

Another presentation tool, Remark, is made for people who know HTML and writing documents in Markdown. The remark tool has some of the best specialties available such as markdown formatting, supporting multiple languages, syntax highlighting, and presentation templates. Working with Remark is incredibly easy. View the setup and running guide here to know how you can get started with this impeccable tool .

Spectacle is a ReactJS based app designed for the ease of markdown presentation developers. You can write your presentations in JSX, Markdown, or MDX with Spectacle. It’s totally up to the user to pick their favorite one and prepare a beautiful presentation. Spectacle provides customized backgrounds, animated colors, slide fragments, and many other specialties to help you form a unique slide deck.

Deck is an open-source GitHub project that’s specifically designed to tailor the needs of users. With Deck, you can try out multiple designs while building up your presentations.

This Markdown-driven content presentation system is easy to use and is available for everyone.

Being a user, you can also make significant contributions to this tool, aiming for its betterment.

Slides are also one of the top-rated markdown presentation tools that are used globally. With slides you can create professional yet beautiful presentations for your needs. Slides provide access to several unique and modern features that can make your presentation look more attractive and inspiring for the audience.

To make your presentations visually appealing and exquisite, you can even collaborate with other designers and developers with the help of slides.

The eleventh tool in our guide is HackMD. You can collaborate on personal, professional, and team documentation in real-time with the HackMD. It is a perfect tool for creating presentations in Markdown as it allows us to put ineffective ideas together and share them with others.

You will get access to some functions in HackMD that you can use for entirely free while developing your presentations in Markdown.

Presenta is one of the best tools for creating presentations with Markdown that lets people make the quickest slides than they could with any other tool. It provides access to several official plugins, tutorials, community guidelines, and built-in features to help the users understand the tool quickly. To better understand how to present work, you can head over to their website and learn from their video tutorials.

With Deckset (MacOs app), you can create presentations in Markdown within the least possible time. If you want to share your ideas with your team members and prepare text documents for your projects, this tool will be a perfect pick for you as it will convert your simple text documents into visually attractive designs.

To convert your boring text documents into attractive presentations or slides, Deckset will help you out.

Quiver is a notebook tool that is specifically designed for programmers to write their codes in Markdown. This tool can be used for several purposes, such as writing project scripts, preparing project guidelines or summaries. If you want to create presentations in Markdown that can appeal to the audience and engage them through a conversational style, then Quiver can help you with this.

Generating attractive slides presentations and slideshows is now even easier with the Pandoc tool. It is a unique tool that produces presentations not only in Markdown but in HTML and JavaScript too. So if you want to display your technical coding text documents in a beautiful style to attract the audience’s attention, then Pandoc should be your priority as it will help you.

You can even break your slideshows into multiple sections with the help of headers and bullet points.

Fusuma is another tool that is designed to help you create slides easily and quickly in Markdown. Very few tools provide the opportunity to create slides for presentations in Markdown, and Fusuma is one of those.

You can also enjoy other features such as exporting your presentations as PDF or deploying GitHub pages and creating slides in real-time. It has the quickest setup, and you can view the process here.

Present is a terminal-based presentation tool that lets users write in Markdown and create attractive presentations. You can add colorful backgrounds, visuals, and charts to convert your simple text document into a beautiful slide. This is a GitHub project, and you can see the installation and user’s guidelines here .

Backslide is the 19th tool on our list. Its core features include automatic templates and live preview server self-contained HTML export solution, automated PDF conversion, and multiple presentations support.

Many people use Backslide to create their presentations, make slides, export them, and convert them into PDF.

Patat is not a very common tool that most people use but a small tool that allows users to create presentations using Markdown. This tool does not have a lot of unique features that can make it stand out from others. But some of the most highlighted features are intelligent slide splitting, multiple fragments, lifetime support, and auto-advancing the configurable delays.

Markdown slides are also a unique project specifically designed for users who want to write their text documents in Markdown. Markdown slides enable users to write their text in a unique and beautiful presentation style with several animations, visual and mathematical calculations. This tool also lets people convert their presentations into PDFs.

S9 is a perfect and free alternative to PowerPoint and keynote. You can write your text in Markdown and format them with the help of available features to make your text look visually compelling and attractive to the audience. This S9 project provides several out-of-the-box themes and built-in support to help users get the most of this tool.

If you want to generate HTML presentations using Markdown quickly and easily, then Cleaver is one of the top-notch options that you should go with to make things easier. With this tool, you can produce splendid slides for presentations to show your simple text.

Not only this, but Cleaver also provides several other options that can make your designs look more professional and excellent.

Conclusion:

Markdown is a writing format used by many technical writers to write down their technical documentation. On average, people belonging to technical fields usually love Markdown, but those from different areas hate it.

It is a unique style of formatting content in an editor without requiring a person to know programming languages such as JavaScript, CSS, Ruby, etc. Many tools help people write their text using Markdown and convert their texts into tempting slides.

How to upload content using your own web address

How to share a pdf as a link.

4 Markdown-powered slide generators

Vector Open Stock. CC BY-SA 3.0.

Imagine you've been tapped to give a presentation. As you're preparing your talk, you think, "I should whip up a few slides."

Maybe you prefer the simplicity of plain text , or maybe you think software like LibreOffice Writer is overkill for what you need to do. Or perhaps you just want to embrace your inner geek.

It's easy to turn files formatted with Markdown into attractive presentation slides. Here are four tools that can do help you do the job.

One of the more flexible applications on this list, Landslide is a command-line application that takes files formatted with Markdown, reStructuredText , or Textile and converts them into an HTML file based on Google’s HTML5 slides template .

All you need to do is write up your slides with Markdown, crack open a terminal window, and run the command landslide followed by the name of the file. Landslide will spit out presentation.html , which you can open in any web browser. Simple, isn’t it?

Don't let that simplicity fool you. Landslide offers more than a few useful features, such as the ability to add notes and create configuration files for your slides. Why would you want to do that? According to Landslide's developer, it helps with aggregating and reusing source directories across presentations.

Viewing presenter notes in a Landslide presentation

Marp is a work in progress, but it shows promise. Short for "Markdown Presentation Writer," Marp is an Electron app in which you craft slides using a simple two-pane editor: Write in Markdown in the left pane and you get a preview in the right pane.

Marp supports GitHub Flavored Markdown . If you need a quick tutorial on using GitHub Flavored Markdown to write slides, check out the sample presentation . It's a bit more flexible than baseline Markdown.

While Marp comes with only two very basic themes, you can add background images to your slides, resize them, and include math. On the down side, it currently lets you export your slides only as PDF files. To be honest, I wonder why HTML export wasn’t a feature from day one.

Editing some simple slides in Marp

You probably know pandoc as a magic wand for converting between various markup languages. What you might not know is that pandoc can take a file formatted with Markdown and create attractive HTML slides that work with the Slidy , Slideous , DZSlides , S5 , and Reveal.js presentation frameworks. If you prefer LaTeX , you can also output PDF slides using the Beamer package .

You'll need to use specific formatting for your slides, but you can add some variables to control how they behave. You can also change the look and feel of your slides, add pauses between slides, and include speaker notes.

Of course, you must have the supporting files for your preferred presentation framework installed on your computer. Pandoc spits out only the raw slide file.

Viewing slides created with Pandoc and DZSlides

Hacker Slides

Hacker Slides is an application for Sandstorm and Sandstorm Oasis that mates Markdown and the Reveal.js slide framework. The slides are simple, but they can be visually striking.

Craft your slide deck in a two-pane editor in your browser—type in Markdown on the left and see it rendered on the right. When you're ready to present, you can do it from within Sandstorm or get a link that you can share with others to present remotely.

What’s that—you say that you don’t use Sandstorm or Sandstorm Oasis? No worries.There's a version of Hacker Slides that you can run on your desktop or server.

Editing slides in Hacker Slides

Two honorable mentions

If you use Jupyter Notebooks (see community moderator Don Watkins' article ) to publish data or instructional texts, then Jupyter2slides is for you. It works with Reveal.js to convert a notebook into a nice set of HTML slides.

If you prefer your applications hosted, test-drive GitPitch . It works with GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket. Just push the source files for your slides to a repository on one of those services, point GitPitch to that repository, and your slides are ready to view at the GitPitch site.

Do you have a favorite Markdown-powered slide generator? Share it by leaving a comment.

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Electron apps

Marp: Markdown presentation ecosystem.

muryoimpl/slippr: markdown presentation app by Electron

joe-re/cafe-pitch Markdown-driven presentation tool built on Electron.

Slide deck frameworks supporting Markdown source

hakimel/reveal.js: The HTML Presentation Framework

jxnblk/mdx-deck: React MDX-based presentation decks

gnab/remark: A simple, in-browser, markdown-driven slideshow tool.

FormidableLabs/spectacle: ReactJS based Presentation Library

deckjs/deck: Deck is a markdown driven content presentation system

Hosted services

Slides.com: Online UI for creating RevealJS decks (no markdown support yet, but maybe someday )

Platon.io: Simple markdown presentations, right in the browser, using remarkjs

Swipe: Create Interactive Online Presentations On Any Device

HackMD: The best way to share knowledge in markdown

Presenta: Make slides fast!

Slidium: Beautiful and Easy Markdown Presentation - Neomobili

Deckset: Presentations from Markdown in No Time

Quiver: Developer notebook, with a presentation mode

Slideas: Slideas is the easiest way to create a beautiful Markdown Presentation, with all the features you need.

Obsidian: Obsidian is a powerful knowledge base that works on top of a local folder of plain text Markdown files.

CLI markdown ⇒ slides conversion tools

Fusuma: A tool to create slides easily for you

present: A terminal-based presentation tool with colors and effects.

backslide: CLI tool for making HTML presentations with Remark.js using Markdown

patat: (Presentations Atop The ANSI Terminal) is a small tool that allows you to show presentations using only an ANSI terminal. It does not require ncurses

markdown-slides: Using markdown, write simple but beautiful presentations with math, animations and media, which can be visualized in a web browser even without an internet connection, or exported to PDF.

S9: Write Your Slides in Plain Text w/ Markdown Formatting Conventions - Free Web Alternative to PowerPoint and Keynote

Cleaver: 30-second Slideshows for Hackers

lee2sman commented Aug 16, 2020

Hi, Pandoc has 5 different ways to make slideshows with markdown! Some examples here .

Sorry, something went wrong.

davidnunez commented Sep 14, 2020

This seems in the same space as Marp, perhaps? https://hiroppy.github.io/fusuma/

dikey0ficial commented Sep 21, 2020

What about present ?

razvn commented Oct 8, 2020

As Slidium and Slideas are the same maybe you should remove the first one which seems to no longer exists under this name.

cogumbreiro commented Oct 14, 2020

https://github.com/sinedied/backslide

thrgamon commented Nov 8, 2020

Obsidian also does this, which is rad: https://obsidian.md/

sabitm commented Dec 11, 2020

here's my favorite presenta

epogrebnyak commented Dec 27, 2020

https://github.com/jaspervdj/patat

geraldb commented Dec 27, 2020 • edited

Slideshow (S9) is another one (disclaimer: from my humble self), see http://slideshow-s9.github.io/ . If I dare to say it's the only one that lets you use / chose template packs (e.g. s6, bespoke.js, shower.js, impress.js, reveal.js, and so on), see http://slideshow-templates.github.io/ and you can design your own template packs (they are actually just GitHub Pages / Jekyll / Liquid templates) and, thus, work by definition "out-of-the-box" on GitHub with GitHub Pages, for example. Free and open source (public domain, actually).

dadoomer commented Jan 10, 2021

Markdown-slides is yet another one (sorry for the self-promotion).

Output to PDF or HTML.

Beautiful output, because it just inserts your stuff into Reveal.js.

Does not need Internet connection.

PhilipMottershead commented Feb 7, 2021

GitPitch is shutting down

"GitPitch is shutting down on March 1, 2021. The trial software is no longer available for download."

fego commented May 12, 2021

Found this one today : https://sli.dev/

danielvelara commented Jun 10, 2021

Markdown Preview Enhanced it's a VSCode extension with a lot of Markdown features, and it comes with a Presentation mode https://shd101wyy.github.io/markdown-preview-enhanced/#/presentation

juanbrujo commented Jun 12, 2021

I've been using Cleaver for years https://github.com/jdan/cleaver

michalradacz commented Jun 22, 2021

Hmmm, Slideas dies? No web, no activity ...

debMan commented Jul 26, 2021

For CLI: https://github.com/maaslalani/slides

acacha commented Oct 22, 2021

Awesome just what I'm looking for!

norman-abramovitz commented Dec 23, 2021

There is a template to make reveal.js work work with mkdocs as well.

https://github.com/dhondta/mkdocs-revealjs-template

alenwesker commented Feb 18, 2022

I've tried some of the above, recommend adding https://github.com/ksky521/nodeppt to the list. It's currently my favorite markdown-to-ppt tool. It supports so many features that at least the {.build.moveIn} and the speaker mode are vital to a slide show.

Recommend everybody try that.

gilcot commented Mar 6, 2022 • edited

Other intersting tools to note:

• https://github.com/googleworkspace/md2googleslides
• https://github.com/astefanutti/decktape
• https://github.com/maaslalani/slides
• https://pkg.go.dev/golang.org/x/tools/present
• https://gitpitch.github.io/gitpitch/#/
• https://github.com/ionelmc/python-darkslide
• https://github.com/anthonywritescode/markdown-to-presentation

kzhk75 commented Mar 8, 2022

• https://github.com/slidevjs/slidev

N0K0 commented Mar 16, 2022

ollej commented Oct 19, 2022

May I recommend the tool Rusty Slider, available as a native application for Windows/Mac/Linux as well as on the web. https://ollej.github.io/rusty-slider/

anonymouscoolguy commented Oct 28, 2022

I have been working on a little side project: https://mdslides.app/

It is built using Reveal.js and Ace , and is a simple markdown presentation tool right in the browser.

EmaSuriano commented Nov 8, 2022

Shout out to this one! Very nice DX, good documentation and fully customizable 👏

easyjobber commented Nov 12, 2022 • edited

Thanks for this presentation and you are truly an inspiration 👏 https://gist.github.com/easyjobber

haakonstorm commented Dec 8, 2022

Slideas unfortunately appear defunct now. :/

rukshn commented Jul 22, 2023

Platon does not seem to be working anymore

kitschpatrol commented Aug 5, 2023

iA Presenter has an opinionated take on the markdown → slides workflow.

It recently hit 1.0. Note that it's Mac only, commercial, and apparently not (yet) scriptable from the CLI.

soaple commented Oct 7, 2023

MarkSlides is a tool that allows you to create slides using Markdown. It is created based on Marp, so any Marp syntax can be rendered to the slide. In addition, it also supports Generating Slides using AI like ChatGPT.

How to create professional slides from Markdown notes

The conference you signed up for is in two weeks, but you haven't started with the slides yet. Focusing on the content should be your top priority, so you start putting together an outline with Google Slides. Nevertheless, you quickly realize that formatting the presentation will take forever: choosing the right font, a background that fits, unique images ... why the spacing between elements is always inconsistent between slides?

I faced this situation when preparing the slides for my presentation on Docs as Code for PyCon APAC 2020. The clock was ticking, so I ended writing the slides in plain text while looking for an alternative to convert these annotations into visually appealing slides.

The tool I ended up choosing was Marp . At first, I was skeptical if Marp would offer the flexibility required to design slides using Markdown, but now I can say I'm happy with the result. So here is what I learned.

Creating the presentation

No matter which tool you use to create the presentation, the first step is to know what you want to explain. Once you have the topic, open a new file with the extension .md . Then, write your notes for your presentation in plain text using Markdown syntax.

New to Markdown? Here is a cheat sheet with the most common annotations you'll need to format titles, links, and tables.

Organizing the presentation

Once you have all the content outlined, split the slides with the annotation --- . Here is an example.

Creating slides with Marp

Marp is the framework we'll use to turn Markdown into a beautiful slide deck. Unfortunately, the tool is not available as a web application, so you'll need a bit of experience playing with the terminal to use the tool.

For example, try to run one of the following commands to convert a Markdown slide deck into HTML, PDF, or PTTX. Replace PITCHME.md with your file name.

Do you want to preview the slides while you edit the contents? To run Marp in watch mode , run the following command instead:

Then, open the resulting HTML file with your preferred browser.

If you use Visual Studio Code , you can preview the resulting slides as you write them with the Marp Extension for VSCode .

Adding a theme

Let's change the style of the presentation. You can use one of the built-in themes . At the top of the MarkDown file, define which theme you want to apply using the directive theme . The file header should look like this:

I've decided to go with the theme gaia for my presentation. Moreover, Marp provides other configurable directives that simultaneously apply to all the slides.

For example, I defined default values for the font color, background image, and enabled pagination for my presentation.

Styling a single slide

In some situations, you'll only want to enable a directive for a given slide. You can apply directives selectively with comments. The next code snippet shows how to disable pagination for the first slide.

Another common directive used per slide is _class . Each theme may come with a set of predefined classes. For example, the theme gaia introduces the class lead . When used, this centers the slide contents.

As you can see, the first slide used the class centering the title, whereas the second slide didn't, and the contents appear aligned on top.

If you're a skilled CSS developer, you might want to create a custom theme from scratch. John Wadleigh explains how to do it in Custom themes with Marp .

Working with images

A picture speaks 1,000 words. Most presentations include images, and Marp extends Markdown to define their size.

Add an image to your slides and change the size with width and height options.

You can also apply filters to images, such as adding opacity, a shadow, or even rotating the image. Here you have all the available predefined CSS filters supported. For example, the following snippet shows how to convert a photo to grayscale mode.

Marp also brings the option to use images as backgrounds . Backgrounds also accept the same filters as images and additional options to position them.

By default, all background images fit the slide, but you can use the option auto to preserve the original size.

The options left or right position the background to the specified side.

Final thoughts

Writing all the slides in Markdown has been fun! I felt much more efficient in creating the presentation. And, the outcome was better than other slide decks I made before using other WYSWYG tools.

On the other hand, it might not work for every presentation because mastering Marp has a learning curve. Indeed, I'd not feel comfortable with the tool if I had to compose a very intricate design.

Let's talk about docs.

Do you want to create great products for technical audiences? Dive into the topic with my articles on technical writing , developer experience , and Docs as Code .

DEV Community

Posted on Oct 25, 2021

The Ultimate List of Markdown Presentation Tools

We have compiled a list of 23 top-notch tools to help you create slide decks with Markdown.

Marp - Marp is a creative tool for preparing beautiful slide decks or presentations. Also known as the Markdown representation ecosystem, Marp has been one of the most reliable and used tools for generating presentations with Markdown.

Slippr - Slippr is an electron-based app that’s used to create Markdown presentations. There are numerous functions available in Slippr to help you customize the most beautiful slides.

CafePitch - It is a GitHub project, and it might be a bit difficult for you to understand its usage. However, you can get a better understanding of setting up and testing the tool here.

Reveal.js - Reveal.js is one of the most innovative and simplest open-source tools out there to create Markdown presentations.

MDX Deck - MDX lets people import visual components such as charts and other designs. These can be embedded with the content in Markdown.

Remark - The remark tool has some of the best specialties available such as markdown formatting and supporting multiple languages.

Spectacle - Spectacle is a ReactJS based app. Spectacle provides customized backgrounds, animated colors, slide fragments, and many other specialties.

Deck - With Deck, you can try out multiple designs while building up your presentations.

Slides - To make your presentations visually appealing and exquisite, you can collaborate with other designers and developers with the help of slides.

Swipe - Swipe lets people prepare any presentation, be it personal or professional.

HackMD - It is a perfect tool for creating presentations in Markdown as it allows users to put ineffective ideas together and share them with others.

Presenta - Presenta provides access to several official plugins, tutorials, community guidelines, and built-in features to help the users understand the tool quickly.

Deckset - To convert your boring text documents into attractive presentations or slides, Deckset will help you out.

Quiver - Quiver is a notebook tool that is specifically designed for programmers to write their codes in Markdown.

Slideas - It provides you with both fantastic features and a quick turnaround for the presentation preparation.

Pandoc - It is a unique tool that produces presentations not only in Markdown but in HTML and JavaScript too.

Fusuma - Fusuma is another tool that is designed to help you create slides easily and quickly in Markdown.

Present - This is a GitHub project, and you can see the installation and user’s guidelines here.

Backslide - You can use Backslide to create your presentations, make slides, export them, and convert them into PDF.

Patat - This tool does not have a lot of unique features that can make it stand out from others. However, it's still a good tool to work with.

Markdown-slides - Markdown slides enable users to write their text in a unique and beautiful presentation style with several animations.

S9 - With S9, you can write your text in Markdown and format them with the help of available features.

Cleaver - If you want to generate HTML presentations using Markdown quickly and easily, then Cleaver is one of the top-notch options that you should go with.

If you'd like to know more about these tools, you can read our complete blog post here: https://tiiny.host/blog/the-ultimate-list-of-markdown-presentation-tools/

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Markdown slides editor

Create your next presentation with Markdown

Goal Oriented

Unlike many other presentation editors, MdSlides is designed to focus on the content rather than moving text blocks back and forth.

Mobile First

The device used does not affect the process of creating presentations, nor the final result.

Installable

Even though it is a web application, it can be used offline or even installed ( see PWAs ).

Creating presentations in MdSlides is declarative in nature. It requires no extra interaction other than writing down one's thoughts.

Processing data is not stored in the application, but in the one's device/browser only.

Open Source

The application development is community-driven. Contributions are welcome on GitHub .

Getting Started

An overview of Markdown, how it works, and what you can do with it.

What is Markdown?

Markdown is a lightweight markup language that you can use to add formatting elements to plaintext text documents. Created by John Gruber in 2004, Markdown is now one of the world’s most popular markup languages.

Using Markdown is different than using a WYSIWYG editor. In an application like Microsoft Word, you click buttons to format words and phrases, and the changes are visible immediately. Markdown isn’t like that. When you create a Markdown-formatted file, you add Markdown syntax to the text to indicate which words and phrases should look different.

For example, to denote a heading, you add a number sign before it (e.g., # Heading One ). Or to make a phrase bold, you add two asterisks before and after it (e.g., **this text is bold** ). It may take a while to get used to seeing Markdown syntax in your text, especially if you’re accustomed to WYSIWYG applications. The screenshot below shows a Markdown file displayed in the Visual Studio Code text editor .

You can add Markdown formatting elements to a plaintext file using a text editor application. Or you can use one of the many Markdown applications for macOS, Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android operating systems. There are also several web-based applications specifically designed for writing in Markdown.

Depending on the application you use, you may not be able to preview the formatted document in real time. But that’s okay. According to Gruber , Markdown syntax is designed to be readable and unobtrusive, so the text in Markdown files can be read even if it isn’t rendered.

The overriding design goal for Markdown’s formatting syntax is to make it as readable as possible. The idea is that a Markdown-formatted document should be publishable as-is, as plain text, without looking like it’s been marked up with tags or formatting instructions.

Why Use Markdown?

You might be wondering why people use Markdown instead of a WYSIWYG editor. Why write with Markdown when you can press buttons in an interface to format your text? As it turns out, there are several reasons why people use Markdown instead of WYSIWYG editors.

Markdown can be used for everything. People use it to create websites , documents , notes , books , presentations , email messages , and technical documentation .

Markdown is portable. Files containing Markdown-formatted text can be opened using virtually any application. If you decide you don’t like the Markdown application you’re currently using, you can import your Markdown files into another Markdown application. That’s in stark contrast to word processing applications like Microsoft Word that lock your content into a proprietary file format.

Markdown is platform independent. You can create Markdown-formatted text on any device running any operating system.

Markdown is future proof. Even if the application you’re using stops working at some point in the future, you’ll still be able to read your Markdown-formatted text using a text editing application. This is an important consideration when it comes to books, university theses, and other milestone documents that need to be preserved indefinitely.

Markdown is everywhere. Websites like Reddit and GitHub support Markdown, and lots of desktop and web-based applications support it.

Kicking the Tires

The best way to get started with Markdown is to use it. That’s easier than ever before thanks to a variety of free tools.

You don’t even need to download anything. There are several online Markdown editors that you can use to try writing in Markdown. Dillinger is one of the best online Markdown editors. Just open the site and start typing in the left pane. A preview of the rendered document appears in the right pane.

You’ll probably want to keep the Dillinger website open as you read through this guide. That way you can try the syntax as you learn about it. After you’ve become familiar with Markdown, you may want to use a Markdown application that can be installed on your desktop computer or mobile device.

How Does it Work?

Dillinger makes writing in Markdown easy because it hides the stuff happening behind the scenes, but it’s worth exploring how the process works in general.

When you write in Markdown, the text is stored in a plaintext file that has an .md or .markdown extension. But then what? How is your Markdown-formatted file converted into HTML or a print-ready document?

The short answer is that you need a Markdown application capable of processing the Markdown file. There are lots of applications available — everything from simple scripts to desktop applications that look like Microsoft Word. Despite their visual differences, all of the applications do the same thing. Like Dillinger, they all convert Markdown-formatted text to HTML so it can be displayed in web browsers.

Markdown applications use something called a Markdown processor (also commonly referred to as a “parser” or an “implementation”) to take the Markdown-formatted text and output it to HTML format. At that point, your document can be viewed in a web browser or combined with a style sheet and printed. You can see a visual representation of this process below.

To summarize, this is a four-part process:

• Create a Markdown file using a text editor or a dedicated Markdown application. The file should have an .md or .markdown extension.
• Open the Markdown file in a Markdown application.
• Use the Markdown application to convert the Markdown file to an HTML document.
• View the HTML file in a web browser or use the Markdown application to convert it to another file format, like PDF.

From your perspective, the process will vary somewhat depending on the application you use. For example, Dillinger essentially combines steps 1-3 into a single, seamless interface — all you have to do is type in the left pane and the rendered output magically appears in the right pane. But if you use other tools, like a text editor with a static website generator, you’ll find that the process is much more visible.

What’s Markdown Good For?

Markdown is a fast and easy way to take notes, create content for a website, and produce print-ready documents.

It doesn’t take long to learn the Markdown syntax, and once you know how to use it, you can write using Markdown just about everywhere. Most people use Markdown to create content for the web, but Markdown is good for formatting everything from email messages to grocery lists.

Here are some examples of what you can do with Markdown.

Markdown was designed for the web, so it should come as no surprise that there are plenty of applications specifically designed for creating website content.

If you’re looking for the simplest possible way to create a website with Markdown files, check out blot.im . After you sign up for Blot, it creates a Dropbox folder on your computer. Just drag and drop your Markdown files into the folder and — poof! — they’re on your website. It couldn’t be easier.

If you’re familiar with HTML, CSS, and version control, check out Jekyll , a popular static site generator that takes Markdown files and builds an HTML website. One advantage to this approach is that GitHub Pages provides free hosting for Jekyll-generated websites. If Jekyll isn’t your cup of tea, just pick one of the many other static site generators available .

If you’d like to use a content management system (CMS) to power your website, take a look at Ghost . It’s a free and open-source blogging platform with a nice Markdown editor. If you’re a WordPress user, you’ll be happy to know there’s Markdown support for websites hosted on WordPress.com. Self-hosted WordPress sites can use the Jetpack plugin .

Markdown doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of word processors like Microsoft Word, but it’s good enough for creating basic documents like assignments and letters. You can use a Markdown document authoring application to create and export Markdown-formatted documents to PDF or HTML file format. The PDF part is key, because once you have a PDF document, you can do anything with it — print it, email it, or upload it to a website.

Here are some Markdown document authoring applications I recommend:

• Mac: MacDown , iA Writer , or Marked 2
• iOS / Android: iA Writer
• Windows: ghostwriter or Markdown Monster
• Linux: ReText or ghostwriter
• Web: Dillinger or StackEdit

In nearly every way, Markdown is the ideal syntax for taking notes. Sadly, Evernote and OneNote , two of the most popular note applications, don’t currently support Markdown. The good news is that several other note applications do support Markdown:

• Obsidian is a popular Markdown note-taking application loaded with features.
• Simplenote is a free, barebones note-taking application available for every platform.
• Notable is a note-taking application that runs on a variety of platforms.
• Bear is an Evernote-like application available for Mac and iOS devices. It doesn’t exclusively use Markdown by default, but you can enable Markdown compatibility mode.
• Joplin is a note taking application that respects your privacy. It’s available for every platform.
• Boostnote bills itself as an “open source note-taking app designed for programmers.”

If you can’t part with Evernote, check out Marxico , a subscription-based Markdown editor for Evernote, or use Markdown Here with the Evernote website.

Looking to self-publish a novel? Try Leanpub , a service that takes your Markdown-formatted files and turns them into an electronic book. Leanpub outputs your book in PDF, EPUB, and MOBI file format. If you’d like to create paperback copies of your book, you can upload the PDF file to another service such as Kindle Direct Publishing . To learn more about writing and self-publishing a book using Markdown, read this blog post .

Presentations

Believe it or not, you can generate presentations from Markdown-formatted files. Creating presentations in Markdown takes a little getting used to, but once you get the hang of it, it’s a lot faster and easier than using an application like PowerPoint or Keynote. Remark ( GitHub project ) is a popular browser-based Markdown slideshow tool, as are Cleaver ( GitHub project ) and Marp ( GitHub project ). If you use a Mac and would prefer to use an application, check out Deckset or Hyperdeck .

If you send a lot of email and you’re tired of the formatting controls available on most email provider websites, you’ll be happy to learn there’s an easy way to write email messages using Markdown. Markdown Here is a free and open-source browser extension that converts Markdown-formatted text into HTML that’s ready to send.

Collaboration

Collaboration and team messaging applications are a popular way of communicating with coworkers and friends at work and home. These applications don’t utilize all of Markdown’s features, but the features they do provide are fairly useful. For example, the ability to bold and italicize text without using the WYSIWYG interface is pretty handy. Slack , Discord , Wiki.js , and Mattermost are all good collaboration applications.

Documentation

Markdown is a natural fit for technical documentation. Companies like GitHub are increasingly switching to Markdown for their documentation — check out their blog post about how they migrated their Markdown-formatted documentation to Jekyll . If you write documentation for a product or service, take a look at these handy tools:

• Read the Docs can generate a documentation website from your open source Markdown files. Just connect your GitHub repository to their service and push — Read the Docs does the rest. They also have a service for commercial entities .
• MkDocs is a fast and simple static site generator that’s geared towards building project documentation. Documentation source files are written in Markdown and configured with a single YAML configuration file. MkDocs has several built in themes , including a port of the Read the Docs documentation theme for use with MkDocs. One of the newest themes is MkDocs Material .
• Docusaurus is a static site generator designed exclusively for creating documentation websites. It supports translations, search, and versioning.
• VuePress is a static site generator powered by Vue and optimized for writing technical documentation.
• Jekyll was mentioned earlier in the section on websites, but it’s also a good option for generating a documentation website from Markdown files. If you go this route, be sure to check out the Jekyll documentation theme .

Flavors of Markdown

One of the most confusing aspects of using Markdown is that practically every Markdown application implements a slightly different version of Markdown. These variants of Markdown are commonly referred to as flavors . It’s your job to master whatever flavor of Markdown your application has implemented.

To wrap your head around the concept of Markdown flavors, it might help to think of them as language dialects. People in New York City speak English just like the people in London, but there are substantial differences between the dialects used in both cities. The same is true for people using different Markdown applications. Using Dillinger to write with Markdown is a vastly different experience than using Ulysses .

Practically speaking, this means you never know exactly what a company means when they say they support “Markdown.” Are they talking about only the basic syntax elements , or all of the basic and extended syntax elements combined, or some arbitrary combination of syntax elements? You won’t know until you read the documentation or start using the application.

If you’re just starting out, the best advice I can give you is to pick a Markdown application with good Markdown support. That’ll go a long way towards maintaining the portability of your Markdown files. You might want to store and use your Markdown files in other applications, and to do that you need to start with an application that provides good support. You can use the tool directory to find an application that fits the bill.

Additional Resources

There are lots of resources you can use to learn Markdown. Here are some other introductory resources:

• John Gruber’s Markdown documentation . The original guide written by the creator of Markdown.
• Markdown Tutorial . An open source website that allows you to try Markdown in your web browser.
• Awesome Markdown . A list of Markdown tools and learning resources.
• Typesetting Markdown . A multi-part series that describes an ecosystem for typesetting Markdown documents using pandoc and ConTeXt .

Take your Markdown skills to the next level.

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It's possible and often times more convenient to write presentation content using Markdown. To create a Markdown slide, add the data-markdown attribute to your <section> element and wrap the contents in a <textarea data-template> like the example below.

Note that this is sensitive to indentation (avoid mixing tabs and spaces) and line breaks (avoid consecutive breaks).

Markdown Plugin

This functionality is powered by the built-in Markdown plugin which in turn uses marked for all parsing. The Markdown plugin is included in our default presentation examples. If you want to manually add it to a new presentation here's how:

External Markdown

You can write your content as a separate file and have reveal.js load it at runtime. Note the separator arguments which determine how slides are delimited in the external file: the data-separator attribute defines a regular expression for horizontal slides (defaults to ^\r?\n---\r?\n$ , a newline-bounded horizontal rule) and data-separator-vertical defines vertical slides (disabled by default). The data-separator-notes attribute is a regular expression for specifying the beginning of the current slide's speaker notes (defaults to notes?: , so it will match both "note:" and "notes:"). The data-charset attribute is optional and specifies which charset to use when loading the external file.

When used locally, this feature requires that reveal.js runs from a local web server . The following example customizes all available options:

Element Attributes

Special syntax (through HTML comments) is available for adding attributes to Markdown elements. This is useful for fragments, among other things.

Slide Attributes

Special syntax (through HTML comments) is available for adding attributes to the slide <section> elements generated by your Markdown.

Syntax Highlighting

Powerful syntax highlighting features are built into reveal.js. Using the bracket syntax shown below, you can highlight individual lines and even walk through multiple separate highlights step-by-step. Learn more about line highlights .

Line Number Offset

You can add a line number offset by adding a number and a colon at the beginning of your highlights.

Configuring marked

We use marked to parse Markdown. To customize marked's rendering, you can pass in options when configuring Reveal :

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Without Markdown Magic

Average amount of time you spend creating slides for a 1 hour workshop

You may be like many creators out there who spend hours battling with layouts, fonts, and formatting.  Every tweak throws things off, and the clock keeps ticking. By the time the slides are 'done,' you're exhausted, little to no energy to focus on the content that truly matters.

With Markdown Magic

Now Imagine this: those same slides takes 15 minutes or less to create! You can now focus on your content in simple Markdown, while Markdown Magic transforms it into an amazing presentation. You find yourself satisfied with a  clear and impactful message that's ready to inspire your audience.

Simplify Your Process with Markdown Magic

Feel the difference Markdown Magic can make in your process – from seamlessly crafting your narrative to delivering impactful presentations that resonate with your audience.

As a creator with amazing ideas to share, translating your thoughts into tidy visually appealing slide decks daunting......Well, not anymore, because with Markdown Magic, you no longer have to struggle with complex design tools or drag and dropping components here and there for hours – You just simply need to express yourself using the familiar syntax of Markdown. Whether you're showcasing code snippets, diagrams, or technical illustrations, Markdown Magic empowers you to create presentations that reflect your expertise and resonate with your audience.

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We understand the importance of providing a familiar user interface, which is why Markdown Magic was built in dark mode. Designed to reduce eye strain and enhance your focus, our dark mode interface feels like home for tech-savvy content creators, which enables you to completely immerse yourself fully in your content creation process with no distractions whatsoever.

It's not just about the familiar interface or creativity – it's also about how efficient and productive you can get with Markdown Magic. With Markdown Magic, you can unleash your ideas at lightning speed.....literally, saving you valuable time to focus on what truly matters. Gone are the days of spending hours tweaking slide layouts. In just a fraction of the time, you can craft polished presentations that will captivate your audience's attention, delivering impactful content without the stress of tedious formatting.

But Hey....Don't Take Our Word for It

Creators like you love the added productivity Markdown Magic gives. Here's what they have to say!

Markdown Magic has been a game-changer for me! As a tech content creator, I used to spend hours tweaking slide layouts and formatting text. With Markdown Magic, I can now focus on crafting engaging content without getting bogged down by design tools.

I've tried numerous presentation tools over the years, but none compare to Markdown Magic. The simplicity of writing in Markdown combined with the customizable themes and effortless multimedia integration make it the perfect solution for speakers and trainers like myself.

Markdown Magic has exceeded all my expectations! As a coach and mentor, I rely on presentations to convey complex ideas and concepts to my clients. Markdown Magic's intuitive interface and time-saving features have been a game-changer for me.

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Slide Presentations

R Markdown renders to four presentation formats:

• beamer_presentation - PDF presentations with beamer
• ioslides_presentation - HTML presentations with ioslides
• slidy_presentation - HTML presentations with slidy
• powerpoint_presentation - PowerPoint presentation
• revealjs::revealjs_presentation - HTML presentations with reveal.js

Each format will intuitively divide your content into slides, with a new slide beginning at each first or second level header.

Insert a horizontal rule ( *** ) into your document to create a manual slide break. Create incremental bullets with >- , as in the .Rmd file below, which is available here on RStudio Cloud.

Continue to Dashboards

R Markdown: The Definitive Guide

4.4 powerpoint presentation.

To create a PowerPoint presentation from R Markdown, you specify the powerpoint_presentation output format in the YAML metadata of your document. Please note that this output format is only available in rmarkdown >= v1.9, and requires at least Pandoc v2.0.5. You can check the versions of your rmarkdown package and Pandoc with packageVersion('rmarkdown') and rmarkdown::pandoc_version() in R, respectively. The RStudio version 1.1.x ships Pandoc 1.19.2.1, which is not sufficient to generate PowerPoint presentations. You need to either install Pandoc 2.x by yourself if you use RStudio 1.1.x, or install a preview version of RStudio (>= 1.2.633), which has bundled Pandoc 2.x.

Below is a quick example (see Figure 4.5 for a sample slide):

FIGURE 4.5: A sample slide in a PowerPoint presentation.

The default slide level (i.e., the heading level that defines individual slides) is determined in the same way as in Beamer slides (Section 4.3.2 ), and you can specify an explicit level via the slide_level option under powerpoint_presentation . You can also start a new slide without a header using a horizontal rule --- .

You can generate most elements supported by Pandoc’s Markdown (Section 2.5 ) in PowerPoint output, such as bold/italic text, footnotes, bullets, LaTeX math expressions, images, and tables, etc.

Please note that images and tables will always be placed on new slides. The only elements that can coexist with an image or table on a slide are the slide header and image/table caption. When you have a text paragraph and an image on the same slide, the image will be moved to a new slide automatically. Images will be scaled automatically to fit the slide, and if the automatic size does not work well, you may manually control the image sizes: for static images included via the Markdown syntax ![]() , you may use the width and/or height attributes in a pair of curly braces after the image, e.g., {width=40%} ; for images generated dynamically from R code chunks, you can use the chunk options fig.width and fig.height to control the sizes.

Please read the section “Producing slide shows with Pandoc” in Pandoc’s manual for more information on slide shows, such as the multi-column layout:

4.4.1 Custom templates

Like Word documents (Section 3.4 ), you can customize the appearance of PowerPoint presentations by passing a custom reference document via the reference_doc option, e.g.,

Note that the reference_doc option requires a version of rmarkdown higher than 1.9:

Basically any template included in a recent version of Microsoft PowerPoint should work. You can create a new *.pptx file from the PowerPoint menu File -> New with your desired template, save the new file, and use it as the reference document (template) through the reference_doc option. Pandoc will read the styles in the template and apply them to the PowerPoint presentation to be created from R Markdown.

4.4.2 Other features

Refer to Section 3.1 for the documentation of other features of PowerPoint presentations, including table of contents (Section 3.1.1 ), figure options (Section 3.1.5 ), data frame printing (Section 3.1.6 ), keeping Markdown (Section 3.1.10.1 ), Markdown extensions (Section 3.1.10.4 ), Pandoc arguments (Section 3.1.10.5 ), shared options (Section 3.1.11 ), and incremental slides since Pandoc 2.15 (Section 4.1.2 .

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How to Make a “Good” Presentation “Great”

• Guy Kawasaki

Remember: Less is more.

A strong presentation is so much more than information pasted onto a series of slides with fancy backgrounds. Whether you’re pitching an idea, reporting market research, or sharing something else, a great presentation can give you a competitive advantage, and be a powerful tool when aiming to persuade, educate, or inspire others. Here are some unique elements that make a presentation stand out.

• Fonts: Sans Serif fonts such as Helvetica or Arial are preferred for their clean lines, which make them easy to digest at various sizes and distances. Limit the number of font styles to two: one for headings and another for body text, to avoid visual confusion or distractions.
• Colors: Colors can evoke emotions and highlight critical points, but their overuse can lead to a cluttered and confusing presentation. A limited palette of two to three main colors, complemented by a simple background, can help you draw attention to key elements without overwhelming the audience.
• Pictures: Pictures can communicate complex ideas quickly and memorably but choosing the right images is key. Images or pictures should be big (perhaps 20-25% of the page), bold, and have a clear purpose that complements the slide’s text.
• Layout: Don’t overcrowd your slides with too much information. When in doubt, adhere to the principle of simplicity, and aim for a clean and uncluttered layout with plenty of white space around text and images. Think phrases and bullets, not sentences.

As an intern or early career professional, chances are that you’ll be tasked with making or giving a presentation in the near future. Whether you’re pitching an idea, reporting market research, or sharing something else, a great presentation can give you a competitive advantage, and be a powerful tool when aiming to persuade, educate, or inspire others.

• Guy Kawasaki is the chief evangelist at Canva and was the former chief evangelist at Apple. Guy is the author of 16 books including Think Remarkable : 9 Paths to Transform Your Life and Make a Difference.

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How-To Geek

6 ways to create more interactive powerpoint presentations.

Engage your audience with cool, actionable features.

Quick Links

• Add a QR code
• Embed Microsoft Forms (Education or Business Only)
• Embed a Live Web Page
• Add Links and Menus
• Add Clickable Images to Give More Info
• Add a Countdown Timer

We've all been to a presentation where the speaker bores you to death with a mundane PowerPoint presentation. Actually, the speaker could have kept you much more engaged by adding some interactive features to their slideshow. Let's look into some of these options.

1. Add a QR code

Adding a QR code can be particularly useful if you want to direct your audience to an online form, website, or video.

Some websites have in-built ways to create a QR code. For example, on Microsoft Forms , when you click "Collect Responses," you'll see the QR code option via the icon highlighted in the screenshot below. You can either right-click the QR code to copy and paste it into your presentation, or click "Download" to add it to your device gallery to insert the QR code as a picture.

In fact, you can easily add a QR code to take your viewer to any website. On Microsoft Edge, right-click anywhere on a web page where there isn't already a link, and left-click "Create QR Code For This Page."

You can also create QR codes in other browsers, such as Chrome.

You can then copy or download the QR code to use wherever you like in your presentation.

2. Embed Microsoft Forms (Education or Business Only)

If you plan to send your PPT presentation to others—for example, if you're a trainer sending step-by-step instruction presentation, a teacher sending an independent learning task to your students, or a campaigner for your local councilor sending a persuasive PPT to constituents—you might want to embed a quiz, questionnaire, pole, or feedback survey in your presentation.

In PowerPoint, open the "Insert" tab on the ribbon, and in the Forms group, click "Forms". If you cannot see this option, you can add new buttons to the ribbon .

As at April 2024, this feature is only available for those using their work or school account. We're using a Microsoft 365 Personal account in the screenshot below, which is why the Forms icon is grayed out.

Then, a sidebar will appear on the right-hand side of your screen, where you can either choose a form you have already created or opt to craft a new form.

Now, you can share your PPT presentation with others , who can click the fields and submit their responses when they view the presentation.

3. Embed a Live Web Page

You could always screenshot a web page and paste that into your PPT, but that's not a very interactive addition to your presentation. Instead, you can embed a live web page into your PPT so that people with access to your presentation can interact actively with its contents.

To do this, we will need to add an add-in to our PPT account .

Add-ins are not always reliable or secure. Before installing an add-in to your Microsoft account, check that the author is a reputable company, and type the add-in's name into a search engine to read reviews and other users' experiences.

To embed a web page, add the Web Viewer add-in ( this is an add-in created by Microsoft ).

Go to the relevant slide and open the Web Viewer add-in. Then, copy and paste the secure URL into the field box, and remove https:// from the start of the address. In our example, we will add a selector wheel to our slide. Click "Preview" to see a sample of the web page's appearance in your presentation.

This is how ours will look.

When you or someone with access to your presentation views the slideshow, this web page will be live and interactive.

4. Add Links and Menus

As well as moving from one slide to the next through a keyboard action or mouse click, you can create links within your presentation to direct the audience to specific locations.

To create a link, right-click the outline of the clickable object, and click "Link."

In the Insert Hyperlink dialog box, click "Place In This Document," choose the landing destination, and click "OK."

What's more, to make it clear that an object is clickable, you can use action buttons. Open the "Insert" tab on the ribbon, click "Shape," and then choose an appropriate action button. Usefully, PPT will automatically prompt you to add a link to these shapes.

You might also want a menu that displays on every slide. Once you have created the menu, add the links using the method outlined above. Then, select all the items, press Ctrl+C (copy), and then use Ctrl+V to paste them in your other slides.

5. Add Clickable Images to Give More Info

Through PowerPoint's animations, you can give your viewer the power to choose what they see and when they see it. This works nicely whether you're planning to send your presentation to others to run through independently or whether you're presenting in front of a group and want your audience to decide which action they want to take.

Start by creating the objects that will be clickable (trigger) and the items that will appear (pop-up).

Then, select all the pop-ups together. When you click "Animations" on the ribbon and choose an appropriate animation for the effect you want to achieve, this will be applied to all objects you have selected.

The next step is to rename the triggers in your presentation. To do this, open the "Home" tab, and in the Editing group, click "Select", and then "Selection Pane."

With the Selection Pane open, select each trigger on your slide individually, and rename them in the Selection Pane, so that they can be easily linked to in the next step.

Finally, go back to the first pop-up. Open the "Animations" tab, and in the Advanced Animation group, click the "Trigger" drop-down arrow. Then, you can set the item to appear when a trigger is clicked in your presentation.

If you want your item to disappear when the trigger is clicked again, select the pop-up, click "Add Animation" in the Advanced Animation group, choose an Exit animation, and follow the same step to link that animation to the trigger button.

6. Add a Countdown Timer

A great way to get your audience to engage with your PPT presentation is to keep them on edge by adding a countdown timer. Whether you're leading a presentation and want to let your audience stop to discuss a topic, or running an online quiz with time-limit questions, having a countdown timer means your audience will keep their eye on your slide throughout.

To do this, you need to animate text boxes or shapes containing your countdown numbers. Choose and format a shape and type the highest number that your countdown clock will need. In our case, we're creating a 10-second timer.

Now, with your shape selected, open the "Animations" tab on the ribbon and click the animation drop-down arrow. Then, in the Exit menu, click "Disappear."

Open the Animation Pane, and click the drop-down arrow next to the animation you've just added. From there, choose "Timing."

Make sure "On Click" is selected in the Start menu, and change the Delay option to "1 second," before clicking "OK."

Then, with this shape still selected, press Ctrl+C (copy), and then Ctrl+V (paste). In the second box, type 9 . With the Animation Pane still open and this second shape selected, click the drop-down arrow and choose "Timing" again. Change the Start option to "After Previous," and make sure the Delay option is 1 second. Then, click "OK."

We can now use this second shape as our template, as when we copy and paste it again, the animations will also duplicate. With this second shape selected, press Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V, type 8 into the box, and continue to do the same until you get to 0 .

Next, remove the animations from the "0" box, as you don't want this to disappear. To do this, click the shape, and in the Animation Pane drop-down, click "Remove."

You now need to layer them in order. Right-click the box containing number 1, and click "Bring To Front." You will now see that box on the top. Do the same with the other numbers in ascending order.

Finally, you need to align the objects together. Click anywhere on your slide and press Ctrl+A. Then, in the Home tab on the ribbon, click "Arrange." First click "Align Center," and then bring the menu up again, so that you can click "Align Middle."

Press Ctrl+A again to select your timer, and you can then move your timer or copy and paste it elsewhere.

Press F5 to see the presentation in action, and when you get to the slide containing the timer, click anywhere on the slide to see your countdown timer in action!

Now that your PPT presentation is more interactive, make sure you've avoided these eight common presentational mistakes before you present your slides.

An official website of the United States government

Here's how you know

The .gov means it's official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

What the New Overtime Rule Means for Workers

One of the basic principles of the American workplace is that a hard day’s work deserves a fair day’s pay. Simply put, every worker’s time has value. A cornerstone of that promise is the  Fair Labor Standards Act ’s (FLSA) requirement that when most workers work more than 40 hours in a week, they get paid more. The  Department of Labor ’s new overtime regulation is restoring and extending this promise for millions more lower-paid salaried workers in the U.S.

Overtime protections have been a critical part of the FLSA since 1938 and were established to protect workers from exploitation and to benefit workers, their families and our communities. Strong overtime protections help build America’s middle class and ensure that workers are not overworked and underpaid.

Some workers are specifically exempt from the FLSA’s minimum wage and overtime protections, including bona fide executive, administrative or professional employees. This exemption, typically referred to as the “EAP” exemption, applies when: 

1. An employee is paid a salary,  

2. The salary is not less than a minimum salary threshold amount, and 

3. The employee primarily performs executive, administrative or professional duties.

While the department increased the minimum salary required for the EAP exemption from overtime pay every 5 to 9 years between 1938 and 1975, long periods between increases to the salary requirement after 1975 have caused an erosion of the real value of the salary threshold, lessening its effectiveness in helping to identify exempt EAP employees.

The department’s new overtime rule was developed based on almost 30 listening sessions across the country and the final rule was issued after reviewing over 33,000 written comments. We heard from a wide variety of members of the public who shared valuable insights to help us develop this Administration’s overtime rule, including from workers who told us: “I would love the opportunity to...be compensated for time worked beyond 40 hours, or alternately be given a raise,” and “I make around $40,000 a year and most week[s] work well over 40 hours (likely in the 45-50 range). This rule change would benefit me greatly and ensure that my time is paid for!” and “Please, I would love to be paid for the extra hours I work!”

The department’s final rule, which will go into effect on July 1, 2024, will increase the standard salary level that helps define and delimit which salaried workers are entitled to overtime pay protections under the FLSA. 

Starting July 1, most salaried workers who earn less than $844 per week will become eligible for overtime pay under the final rule. And on Jan. 1, 2025, most salaried workers who make less than $1,128 per week will become eligible for overtime pay. As these changes occur, job duties will continue to determine overtime exemption status for most salaried employees.

The rule will also increase the total annual compensation requirement for highly compensated employees (who are not entitled to overtime pay under the FLSA if certain requirements are met) from $107,432 per year to $132,964 per year on July 1, 2024, and then set it equal to $151,164 per year on Jan. 1, 2025.

Starting July 1, 2027, these earnings thresholds will be updated every three years so they keep pace with changes in worker salaries, ensuring that employers can adapt more easily because they’ll know when salary updates will happen and how they’ll be calculated.

The final rule will restore and extend the right to overtime pay to many salaried workers, including workers who historically were entitled to overtime pay under the FLSA because of their lower pay or the type of work they performed. 

We urge workers and employers to visit  our website to learn more about the final rule.

Jessica Looman is the administrator for the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division. Follow the Wage and Hour Division on Twitter at  @WHD_DOL  and  LinkedIn .  Editor's note: This blog was edited to correct a typo (changing "administrator" to "administrative.")

• Wage and Hour Division (WHD)
• Fair Labor Standards Act
• overtime rule

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