PMean » Presenting research data

Recommended: Bibliographies and citations (in R Markdown)

pmean — Thu, 18 Apr 2019 13:22:35 +0000

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Recommended: LaTeX/Mathematics

pmean — Fri, 08 Mar 2019 21:29:07 +0000

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Recommended: Convert PowerPoint Slides to xaringan (remark.js) Slides

pmean — Sun, 30 Dec 2018 18:14:25 +0000

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Recommended: Make PowerPoint Presentations with R Markdown

pmean — Wed, 05 Dec 2018 19:00:51 +0000

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PMean: Small group presentations using screen sharing tools

pmean — Mon, 07 Nov 2016 23:53:39 +0000

I received a suggestion for the Kansas City R Users Group to use screen sharing tools. I am going to experiment with this a bit. Here are two tools worth trying.

Screenleap is a web based system. The person presenting has to download a small software program but others can just joint via their web browser.

Skype has the ability to make conference calls and to share your screen during the conference call.

If I find out more about the pros and cons of these two systems, I will let you know.

PMean: Changing the font size in RStudio

pmean — Mon, 08 Aug 2016 18:44:14 +0000

Suppose you’re giving a talk and using R Studio. You want to make the fonts a bit larger so your audience can read them. It’s easy to do, once you know where to look.

Go to the menu in RStudio and click on Tools and then Global Options. Select the Appearance tab on the left. Again buried in the middle of things is the font size.

Change this to 14 or 16 to start with and see what it looks like. This changes the font size in both the editor window and the console.

You may also want to change the margins. You can’t do this directly in RStudio, but you can run the function options(width=60) to narrow from the default of 80 columns to 60. If things don’t fit well, try options(width=40).

PMean: Changing the font size in R

pmean — Mon, 08 Aug 2016 18:34:30 +0000

This is one of those obvious things that’s not obvious when you need it most. Suppose I’m doing a demo of R for a group like our wonderful Kansas City R Users Group. I want to have a readable sized font. Here’s how you do it.

Go to the menu and select Edit and Gui Preferences. You’ll see this dialog box.

Buried in the middle of everything is a font size. Try a value of 14 or 16 to start. You may need to change the width of your output from the default of 80 to a lower value like 60 or 40. You can do this in the same dialog box (Console columns field) or you can run the function options(width=60) or options(width=40).

If you are cutting and pasting code from notepad into R, then there is an easy way to increase the font size in notepad. Click on FORMAT then FONT and you will see the following dialog box.

Increase the font size to 18 or 24 and everyone will see what you are doing much better.

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PMean: Equations using MathType

pmean — Sun, 12 Apr 2015 16:07:19 +0000

I’m ordinarily not a big fan of commercial software, but one product that I would have a hard time living without is MathType. It produces mathematical equations with ease and the appearance is almost always perfect. It’s hard to do this, especially with equations have lots of superscripts and subscripts. You get the size or spacing wrong and all of a sudden things look really ugly and it is hard to fix. TeX is a very good product, too, but I have grown so used to MathType that it is really hard to make the switch. I had to upgrade MathType recently to version 6.9 and I wanted to experiment with MathType equations on my blog. Here are some examples.

Here’s a simple equation related to something called the power prior.

This is the default option, which saves the file at 96 dots per inch (dpi). The letters are a bit fuzzy.

Here’s the same equation where the default file is saved at 120 dpi. It’s a bit cleaner, but seems a bit out of proportion with the regular text.

The default options under “Other” is 300 dpi and it looks sharp and crisp, but way too large.

One final choice is 240 dpi (see above). Again, way too big. This choice actually, though, works well for PowerPoint where the font sizes are so much larger.

Recommended: Data doesn’t speak for itself

pmean — Thu, 01 May 2014 15:59:12 +0000

This blog post explains that you can’t just put a graph up on a screen and immediately expect people to understand it. You need to provide critical context to help your audience.

Thomas C. Redman. Data Doesn’t Speak for Itself. Harvard Business Review. April 29, 2014. Available at: http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/04/data-doesnt-speak-for-itself/