Tracy Teal | These are a few of my favorite things (about Quarto presentations) | RStudio (2022)

Hi, so I'm super excited to be here. So when I was starting college, I was super excited, because I was going to be doing math and science. And I would just get to work with equations and numbers and do experiments and play with liquid nitrogen, and I would never have to write anything ever again.

And I managed to make it through, I would say, a lot of my undergraduate career without that being too incorrect, which might say something about my scientific education. But when I got to graduate school, I quickly realized that you couldn't just do the science, you actually also had to talk about it. And an excellent talk here in this room yesterday by Lewis Kervin, sometimes you just need words.

So I was super fortunate to have some mentors who helped me learn how to write and communicate, tell a narrative. So I turned the corner, and I'm okay with writing now. I've got a lot more practice at it. So much so now that if you work with me, one of the things as a part of onboarding to work with me is that Hadley will tell someone that my love language is Google Docs.

So as the open source program director at RStudio, now pause it, if you work with me, expect to see a lot of Google Docs. Great to have just met you, Elliot, expect some Google Docs. So I'm pretty squared away on that.

But there's still presentations, and I do like talking about ideas. So I'll submit the talk, I'm super excited about it. I'll even write the talk. And then when it comes to doing the slides, I am never excited. I'm never thinking like, oh, this is going to be great. I'm going to sit down to do my slides, I'll be able to put stuff right where I want it on the slide, my data and code, I'll just be able to integrate it seamlessly into my slides. And if I make any changes, no big deal, it'll just automatically update. That has not once been a thought that has gone through my mind.

Until now. Until Quarto. So Quarto is making presentations fun again, or for me at least, for the first time. I am so excited about Quarto that I would sing about it, but that is not an area of strength for me. So instead, I have the words to favorite things, and I'm going to revise these words for Quarto.

So Quarto is making presentations fun again, or for me at least, for the first time.

So you may be familiar with this component of the song. Again, not an area of strength, but it's kind of a good tune, so I might accidentally sing. So raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens, brown paper packages tied up with string, these are a few of my favorite things. I do like most of those things, but I do also like Quarto.

Visual editor

So raindrops on roses. Instead of raindrops on roses, I am going to talk about visual edits. So I mentioned one of the things that I found frustrating is that I couldn't, like, figure out where I'm going to put stuff on my slides. So this is a very straightforward slide, list item one, two, three, but what I want to show you is how I did this when I was creating this slide.

So I have my code here. There we go. So I can switch to visual. I can see it here as source or as visual. I can add in my list item here, switch back to source. There it is as source. And then if I render it, it's going to render right here in preview. So I can really integrate where I'm writing my code and being able to see things right away. So that's a really big deal for me, because that's how I put my slides together.

Columns and tables

Whiskers on kittens. Kittens are one of my favorites. But one of my other favorites is columns and tables. So again, when you're thinking about how to construct your slides, how you lay things out is really important. So if I'm thinking, oh, what are some of my other favorite things besides Quarto, ice cream is top of the list, R and Python, I do like both, I'm so excited about Posit. Least favorite things, banana flavor, fine as a banana, not a good flavor in anything else. I know people have different opinions. Slamming doors, nails on chalkboards, locking keys in the car, to refer to Julia and Max's, I have done that. I still fear it, actually.

So what if I wanted to add another column, put in an image? No big deal. And when I say no big deal, let's take a look at the code that goes along with columns. This is pretty straightforward. We have, hey, we're going to do some columns. And then we have the columns and the information that's in them. We can also change the column width super easily. So there's a lot of flexibility in how we put things together. And again, combined with that visual editor, let's try some stuff out, see how it looks. I would almost say, like, I've never had sort of this much power of placement in my slides unless it was, like, HTML tables, but I know we're not supposed to compare things to HTML, so forget I said that.

So tables. Tables are another thing that has never been a joyful experience in my presentation creation. So this is a table. I took some data from scraped reviews of ice cream from a few different websites, and which are the most favorite ice cream flavors. So I took this data, and I put it into a table. This is just a cable table. So really not a lot of complexity to this table, but integrates straight in with my slides.

I can do a GT table. So this is GT, a little cooler looking, has a little bit of color, better formatting. These are really some of the, like, fundamental things around GT. I'm not using all the fancy features here. But everything that's here is possible for you. So what I really love about any system, when we talk about, like, being code first and people are talking about the UI, is what this makes possible. So, like, where you can start and then where you can go with things is, like, only limited by your imagination and how much time you want to spend formatting.

Speaker notes

So great. My slides are doing great. Now I'm going to have to give my presentation. So bright copper kettles. I like kettles. I like wine. I guess I like tea. I had to look up what a copper kettle was, actually. But notes for the speaker. So that's another thing that you want as a presenter. So I did mention I don't love the presentation component. So when I'm putting together a talk, I actually start with the notes. And so it's really nice to be able to have those notes there for me and then build the slides actually kind of in the reverse order.

So here's just a regular slide, a slide with speaker notes, a slide content. This is the code that would generate that slide. And then this is what it looks like to me as a speaker. So I have the slide that I'm talking about, then I have the time, and then I have in that bottom right where the speaker notes go, and then my next slide. Everything that you would hope for as a speaker. And again, I just really appreciate how it's all integrated into one document. So you're really working just like start to finish in one place. And not having a context switch has been a really nice feature.

Code and reproducibility

And next, we have warm woolen mittens. I like warm woolen mittens. My hands are always cold. So code first keeps things stable. It's a bit of a stretch, I had to run. But this is really about what I referred to at the beginning around the idea of reproducibility. So as Garrick mentioned in my introduction, I spent many years teaching people about how to work with data, a code, and a research context, good practices. And so the reproducibility component is essential when we're thinking about scientific communication.

And so within Quarto, the slides, the figure, and the code, they're all integrated. And so I've had situations where I've put together a presentation, and I had a figure in that presentation. I wanted to use that figure again, but I couldn't actually remember how I had generated that figure. We don't have that problem here, right? It's all integrated together. And so I think about sharing things with collaborators, but I also especially think about sharing things with future me, because I don't necessarily remember what past me did, and past me doesn't always make good choices.

And so I think about sharing things with collaborators, but I also especially think about sharing things with future me, because I don't necessarily remember what past me did, and past me doesn't always make good choices.

And so the more I can document, the more things are integrated, the easier it makes to reproduce things, to share, to communicate effectively and accurately what we're doing, especially in a research context. So we can see here, again, this is just straightforward ggplot code, and then here we have the graph that this code generates here below, just all right together. So in general, right, I wouldn't show the code necessarily along with the figure. But now, if you go get the slides, you have right there the code that went into the figure. There's no questions about what it was that I was communicating in this talk.

Themes

Okay, next we come to brown paper packages, and this is very apt with themes to delight in. Okay, so themes to delight in, again, kind of a standard boring slide. But we can easily change our themes. So I used the super exciting default theme in this presentation, aesthetics are something I'm working on as well. And so you can see, that's going to work, play, yes, okay. But I can change the theme. So Quarto has some built-in themes, dark being one of them. And so you see, I re-render, the theme changes, I'm ready to go, I'm going to try solarized, which I actually really like. That's another theme. So these are the built-in themes.

But again, if we refer back to one of the talks yesterday that said, something you really can do to help yourself a lot is to build themes for your organization, for yourself, that you use time and again, that match whatever it is that you need to be doing for your organization, for yourself, meet whatever standards you need. And so you could spend a lot of time building your own theme, but I bet already people in this room are starting to make amazing themes. And so the opportunity to share these with each other and easily switch back and forth is really meaningful because I'm not spending time recreating my slides every time, I can just change the theme and have a different look and feel.

Sharing formats

All right, finally, we're at tied up with string and formats to share. So tied up with string is really the end, right? You have your presentation, you need to share it. Mene and Julie did a great job this morning talking about all the different formats that you can share in. So this here is an HTML presentation. That's great. It works right in my browser. And it also is really good for accessibility because you can make use of all the things that are already built into HTML around screen readers, colors. So people are able to make use of the settings that they have in their browser already when you're sharing HTML.

Lots of times we do need PDFs to share, distribute, print out, and carry around with us. So PDFs are something that is straightforward from these as well. Again, all the same document, creating all of these different formats. And finally, I really appreciate the work that the Quarto team has put into making PowerPoints. There are a lot of organizations that need to use PowerPoints. So if you are in one of those organizations, you are probably not culturally going to be able to shift your entire organization over to using Quarto. One, because culture change is hard. But two, there are requirements in government agencies and drug discovery around the kinds of information that you share and how you share it.

So I think what we've talked about a lot in this meeting is meeting people where they are, understanding what people need, and building towards that rather than saying, like, oh, you need to be doing this or some idea of what's best is really creating opportunities for people to do what it is they need to do in their context.

So PowerPoint is one you would change in that header where we are changing the theme. You can at the beginning say that you want a PowerPoint output, and you can make a PowerPoint output from within Quarto. And again, you have all those advantages of being able to integrate your code and your visualization and you're not doing what I did, which would be like, get it out of R, put it into Illustrator, then take it from Illustrator and put it into PowerPoint. So those days are at least a little bit behind me. But looking ahead, I'm so excited about the opportunities that this presents.

So here we go. This is how we've rewritten the Quarto song, Favorite Things for Quarto. So it does rhyme. So visual edits, columns and tables, notes for the speaker, codes first keep slides stable, themes to delight in, and formats to share. These are a few of my favorite things. I couldn't not sing it because I've literally had it in my head for like two weeks straight.

So these are some places where you can learn more. There's a lot of documentation on the Quarto website. You've been sent there for a lot of different reasons. Quarto presentations, this slide deck is in GitHub if you want kind of the basics of how to get started on things. You should subscribe to the Glimpse newsletter. We had the first one come out just a couple weeks ago. We'll have another one in August that'll have less about our tools and how to use them, especially after this meeting.

So I'm just excited to be here. For me, it was just such a joy to make this presentation. I so appreciate the work the Quarto team has done, how they've listened to people like me in thinking about how they need to communicate their results. And I'm just so excited to see what you do with Quarto, what you share, and what you communicate about to make the changes that are important in your work and your life in your communities. Thank you so much.