Instant Presentations?

For normal people making a presentation is as simple as opening PowerPoint and starting typing.

But I’m not normal. 🙂

I would like to start with a mind map and end up with a presentation – with Markdown as my preferred intermediary.

It doesn’t matter what the presentation is. Mine tend to be in one of the following categories:

• Something incredibly informal, perhaps to share with colleagues.
• A conference presentation.
• Workshop materials.

And sometimes the material isn’t going to be a presentation. Or at any rate not just a presentation. Hence Markdown being my preferred medium – as it can be readily converted to eg HTML.

And I want a low friction way of creating a presentation the way I like to create it.

The Workflow I Was Aiming For

The ideal steps go something like this:

1. Have an idea.
2. Create a mind map with the idea in.
3. Work on the mind map until it’s time to flesh out some slides.
4. Generate the skeleton Markdown for the slides.
5. Flesh out the slides.
6. Create the presentation – as readable by PowerPoint.

Steps 5 and 6 are, of course, iterative.

How I Built The Tooling For The Workflow

Steps 1 – 3 are all in my head or using MindNode, a very nice multi-platform mind mapping tool.

Steps 5 and 6 are:

• Use a text editor to work on the Markdown (with some extensions)
• Use my mdpre and md2pptx open source tools – via the make utility – to generate pure Markdown and convert it to PowerPoint .pptx format.

Decent text editors and make enable those last two steps to be quick and frictionless.

Step 4 is the interesting one. Let’s look at it in more detail – including how it’s done:

• I wrote a Shortcuts shortcut – that could run on iOS, iPad OS, or Mac OS (as of Mac OS 12 Monterey). It exports a mind map you select to Markdown, does a small amount of editing, and copies it to the clipboard. MindNode has a built in action to export to a number of formats, including Markdown. Which is why I’m favouring MindNode for this task.
• I wrote a Keyboard Maestro macro that invokes the shortcut.
• The same macro writes the Markdown out – to a directory and file you nominate.
• It also creates a make file that invokes mdpre and then md2pptx.
• It also copies some files – boilerplate Markdown and CSS – into place.

So, the whole thing is as automatic as it could be – with the user specifying only what they need to. And it runs very fast – and much more reliably than a human doing it.

Here is what a presentation outline looks like in MindNode.

I’ve deliberately used text that describes what the generated parts will be.

And here’s the Markdown the whole process generates.

=include metadata.md
=include standard.css

# Presentation title

## Section 1

### Slide A
* Bullet 1
* Bullet 2

### Slide B

## Section 2

### Slide C

As you can see, it’s plain text – which is what Markdown is. So you could use any text editor you like to work on this. And you can apply Git version control to it – which is often what I do for more formal presentations.

Actually the =include lines aren’t standard Markdown; They are what mdpre will recognise as instructions to include files. In this case both metadata.md and standard.css embed other files the same way.

Conclusion

One final thought: You might think that a mind map is overkill for a presentation but consider what a minimal mind map is: It’s just a single word, or maybe it’s just the title. MindNode, for one, makes it very easy to create just such a mind map. It really is very minimal indeed. And I would hope that any formal presentation would go through a structural process like mind mapping.

So, “Instant Presentation”? Well, not quite – but very close. And close enough to make it easy and quick to kick off another presentation – however formal or informal.