Making interactive presentations in Stata

In this presentation, I will go through the workflow of creating an interactive presentation in Stata (a .smcl presentation) with smclpres based on a small example presentation.

Some talks are primarily on how to do things in Stata, like a lecture on graphs in Stata or a talk at a Stata Users' Group meeting. In those cases, a .smcl presentation can be useful. A .smcl presentation is a series of linked .smcl files that open in the viewer inside Stata (like help files). The strength of a .smcl presentation is that it can contain links that execute examples, open help files, open do-files, etc.

A .smcl presentation is all about illustrating how to do something in Stata, so preparing for such a talk typically starts with preparing a set of examples in a do-file. By adding specific comments to that do-file, for example, to indicate when a slide starts and when it ends, what the title of the slide is, etc., the smclpres command can turn that do-file into a .smcl presentation. Moreover, the pres2html command can turn that .smcl presentation into an HTML handout so that participants can easily access the content after the presentation.

The presentation