Dr Lukasz Bonenberg from the Nottingham Geospatial Institute will give a talk called "Take it easy with Markdown".

Microsoft Office is the most widely used office suite for a number of years now, mostly due to ease of use and initial flexibility. A common conception is that Latex is predominantly of academic use, due to a steep learning curve, and while it handles complex equation and big documents well, it fares poorly when comparing the writing efficiency, especially when the grammar is considered.

In this talk, instead of challenging this view, I want to present an alternative - a combination of markdown and pandoc, that creates a very efficient distraction free environment, is both easy to use and allows to convert results to Microsoft Office and Latex (Beamer).

The aim of the short talk is to demonstrate the efficiency of this method and how it can fit in into existing report writing and presentation routine. I will also discuss the reasons this approach might be beneficial as well as its shortcomings.

Dr Bonenberg is currently employed at the Nottingham Geospatial Institute focusing on research and teaching in the areas of navigation and positioning.  His recent work includes GNSS interference and jamming.  He strongly believes in popularisation of science and technology, as well as use of open source tools for the reproducible research.