Create Table of Contents in Beamer

This lesson teaches you how to create and customize your presentation outline in Beamer

• 1. Create a table of contents in beamer
• 2. Hide subsections from table of contents
• 3. Display table of contents with current section
• 4. Incremental display of table of contents

1. How to add the table of contents to beamer?

Creating the table of contents in Beamer can be done with the same manner as in standard LaTeX. The first thing that we should do is to structure our presentation using the commands \section<> and \subsection<> ( \section*<> and \subsection*<> , to hide it from table of contents). It should be noted that with beamer class these commands will not create a heading at the position where we use them.

Step 1: Organize and structure your presentation using sections and subsections

Let’s assume we have the following structure:

• Problem statement
• Existing results
  • Method 1
  • Method 2

  Here is the corresponding LaTeX code to this structure:

  % Presentation structure \section \section \subsection \subsection \subsection \section \section*

  Step 2: Create the outline frame

  You are already familiar with frame environment which has been used in this lesson to create the title page. With the same manner, we will create a frame and add a title to it, let’s say “Outline” or “Presentation plan”. Then we will add \tableofcontents command inside it to print all sections and subsections of the presentation. Here is a complete code:

  % Create a Table of Contents in Beamer \documentclass % Theme choice: \usetheme \usecolortheme % Title page details: \title \author \date \begin % Title page frame \begin \titlepage \end % Outline frame \begin \tableofcontents \end % Presentation structure \section \section \subsection \subsection \subsection \section \section* \begin % to enforce entries in the table of contents \end \end

  Compiling this code yields:

  Make outline frame in Beamer 1" width="1024" height="768" />

  Comments:

  • We used the theme "AnnArbor" with the color style "crane" .
  • References section is removed from table of contents, thanks to the command \section*<> .
  • Under each section or subsection you should create different slides that correspond to it

  2. Hide subsections from table of contents

  Sometimes, it’s convenient to remove all subsections from the table of contents. This can be done easily using the following line code:

  % Hide subsections from table of contents \begin \tableofcontents[hideallsubsections] \end

  Using this in the previous code, we get the following presentation outline:

  

  3. Recurring table of contents

  If you wish to show table of contents with highlighted current section before starting every section you can use the following code:

  % Outline frame \begin \tableofcontents \end % Current section \AtBeginSection[ ] < \begin \tableofcontents[currentsection] \end >

  and here how we get before every section:

  

  • The option currentsection yields all sections except the current one to be shown in a semi-transparent way. Moreover, all subsections except those in the current section are shown in the semi-transparent way.

  4. Display section by section of table of contents

  If we would like to show the table of contents in an incremental way, we can add the option pausesections to the \tableofcontents command. Here is the corresponding LaTeX code:

  % Outline frame \begin \tableofcontents[pausesections] \end

  This yields the following effect triggered by mouse click or keyboard next slide key.

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