Creating Presentations with LaTeX Beamer

Build professional, math-friendly slide decks with the power of LaTeX.

What is Beamer?

Beamer is a LaTeX document class for creating presentation slides. It produces PDF files that can be shown in any PDF viewer in full-screen mode. Beamer is especially popular in academia because it handles mathematical notation, citations, and cross-references just as well as a regular LaTeX document, while providing professional slide themes and transition effects out of the box.

Basic Slide

A Beamer presentation uses \documentclass{beamer} and organizes content into frame environments. Each frame becomes one slide:

\documentclass{beamer}

\title{Introduction to Machine Learning}
\author{Jane Doe}
\date{February 2026}

\begin{document}

\begin{frame}
    \frametitle{What is Machine Learning?}
    Machine learning is a subset of artificial intelligence
    that enables systems to learn from data and improve
    their performance without being explicitly programmed.
\end{frame}

\end{document}

The \frametitle command sets the heading displayed at the top of each slide.

Title Slide

The title slide is created with \titlepage inside a frame. It uses the \title, \author, \date, and optionally \institute information from the preamble:

\title{Deep Learning for Computer Vision}
\author{Jane Doe}
\institute{University of Example}
\date{February 2026}

\begin{document}

\begin{frame}
    \titlepage
\end{frame}

% Optional: table of contents slide
\begin{frame}
    \frametitle{Outline}
    \tableofcontents
\end{frame}

Bullet Points

Bullet lists work exactly the same way as in regular LaTeX documents. The itemize environment is the most common way to structure slide content:

\begin{frame}
    \frametitle{Key Contributions}
    \begin{itemize}
        \item A novel architecture for image classification
        \item State-of-the-art results on three benchmarks
        \item 40\% reduction in training time
        \item Open-source implementation available
    \end{itemize}
\end{frame}

You can also use enumerate for numbered lists and nest lists within each other.

Themes

Beamer comes with many built-in themes that change the visual appearance of your slides. Add a \usetheme command in the preamble:

\documentclass{beamer}

% Choose a presentation theme:
\usetheme{Madrid}

% Other popular themes:
% \usetheme{Warsaw}     % navigation sidebar
% \usetheme{Berlin}     % compact header with sections
% \usetheme{Copenhagen} % clean with headline
% \usetheme{Boadilla}   % minimal and clean
% \usetheme{CambridgeUS}% red accents
% \usetheme{AnnArbor}   % blue and yellow

% Optionally change the color theme:
\usecolortheme{seahorse}

% Remove navigation symbols (often preferred):
\setbeamertemplate{navigation symbols}{}

You can also combine presentation themes with separate color themes (like beaver, crane, dolphin, seahorse) and font themes for fine-grained control.

Two-Column Slides

Use the columns environment to create side-by-side layouts. This is useful for placing text next to an image or comparing two items:

\begin{frame}
    \frametitle{Architecture Overview}
    \begin{columns}
        \begin{column}{0.5\textwidth}
            \begin{itemize}
                \item Encoder-decoder structure
                \item Multi-head attention
                \item Residual connections
                \item Layer normalization
            \end{itemize}
        \end{column}
        \begin{column}{0.5\textwidth}
            \centering
            \includegraphics[width=\textwidth]{architecture.png}
        \end{column}
    \end{columns}
\end{frame}

Math in Slides

One of Beamer's strongest features is that all LaTeX math commands work exactly as they do in regular documents. You can include inline math, display equations, and even aligned multi-line equations:

\begin{frame}
    \frametitle{Loss Function}
    We minimize the cross-entropy loss:
    \[
        \mathcal{L} = -\sum_{i=1}^{N} y_i \log(\hat{y}_i)
    \]

    where $y_i$ is the true label and $\hat{y}_i$ is the
    predicted probability for class $i$.
\end{frame}

Adding Images to Slides

Include images with \includegraphics, just like in regular documents. Remember to load the graphicx package (Beamer loads it automatically in most cases):

\begin{frame}
    \frametitle{Results}
    \centering
    \includegraphics[width=0.8\textwidth]{results-chart.png}

    \vspace{0.5cm}
    Our method outperforms all baselines across every metric.
\end{frame}

Overlays

Overlays let you reveal content progressively within a single slide, similar to animations in PowerPoint. The simplest way is \pause:

\begin{frame}
    \frametitle{Step by Step}
    \begin{itemize}
        \item First, collect the data
        \pause
        \item Then, preprocess and clean it
        \pause
        \item Train the model
        \pause
        \item Evaluate on the test set
    \end{itemize}
\end{frame}

For finer control, use overlay specifications with angle brackets. The \only command shows content on specific slides, while \visible reserves space even when hidden:

\begin{frame}
    \frametitle{Progressive Reveal}

    % Show only on slide 1 of this frame:
    \only<1>{This appears first.}

    % Show only on slide 2:
    \only<2>{This replaces the first text.}

    % Show from slide 2 onward:
    \visible<2->{This appears on slide 2 and stays.}

    % Highlight on a specific slide:
    \begin{itemize}
        \item<1-> Always visible
        \item<2-> Appears on slide 2
        \item<3-> Appears on slide 3
    \end{itemize}
\end{frame}

Each overlay creates an additional page in the PDF. When presenting in full-screen mode, advancing through these pages simulates animations.