Stratus3D

A blog on software engineering by Trevor Brown

Inserting Code Samples Into PowerPoint

Displaying code in PowerPoint seems to be a pain. I came up with a simple way to get syntax highlighting in powerpoints using GitHub Gist. There may be better ways of doing this, but I found this way to be the most convenient for me on a Mac:

  1. Copy code from terminal (or whatever application you are viewing it in) and paste it into a GitHub Gist.
  2. Save gist and copy code out of the gist and into TextEdit (make sure TextEdit is in rich text mode before you paste in your code).
  3. Copy from TextEdit into your powerpoint and choose “keep formatting” from the paste icon that appears.

I found that creating a new text box before pasting in the code is a good idea as it allows you to control the font size of the code separate from everything else on the slide. It also allows you to set a background color for the code sample.

I know there are other ways of doing this out there, but I thought I would post my method as it’s very simple and uses GitHub’s syntax highlighting. If you have a better way of doing this I would love to hear about it!