How to make slides without powerpoint (or LibreOffice Impress)

I started to use R Markdown with RStudio, but what is Markdown? :

"Markdown is a simple markup language designed to make authoring web content easy for everyone"

So it's easy to do a report of the millions of figures and analysis  while experimenting with a dataset or developing a manuscript.

A good stating point is the post of Jeromy Anglim's Blog about that.

Then I found that you could produce slides for presentations with only an additional step pandoc. The Markdown generated by RStudio can be converted to html slides and there are different "kinds" of slides you can convert to, and they look nice.
I have to prepare two talks for the RAE2012, so why not?

I was happy because I thought I would end with the curse of Powerpoint/Impress

But it was not so easy, things were not always as they should be. I was pressed to finish and tables don't get formated, figures don't get in the places I wanted, and the videos don't work at all. 

After endless try and error cycles  I finished, I have to learn a little of html and the posts of Markus Gesmann and Christopher Gandrud  were invaluable. I decided to use slidy and as there was no internet connection at the conference room everything must be included in the html file so I used the following pandoc command:

pandoc --self-contained -s -S -i -t slidy -V slidy-url=slidy  RAE2012_Charla.md -o RAE2012_Charla_slidy.html

for use this you have to download the Slidy code in a local folder called "slidy" 


 The source of one of talks is here and the slides are
 here


One drawback is that if I upload talk to figshare the html code is displayed and not like when uploading a pdf, it shows the formated talk ...

I think it's a matter of experience, things get easier after some work,  but I'm not sure if I get rid of powerpoint/impress... next time we'll see.