I have had the opportunity to speak at various DataScience MeetUp events in Nottingham, Loughborough and London. Typically, rather than use the usual PowerPoint presentation, I prefer running LIVE codes as this gives the audience the confidence that my codes work and is repeatable. The challenge with this for me however is that I tend to do most of my preparation at the office and end up using my personal laptop for the eventual presentation. This means that I run a 'office computer' - github repo - personal computer back and forth triangle. Not until a colleague in the office introduced me to azure notebooks (thanks Darren!).
Microsoft Azure Notebooks is a free service that provides Jupyter Notebooks along with supporting packages for R, Python and F#. Using this notebooks is easy! All one needs is a free account at www.notebooks.azure.com. Azure notebooks uses libraries for grouping notebooks. For example, I now have a library for my MeetUp events based on location
Once you are signed in and you've created a new library by clicking the '+New Library' button, you can use the '+New' button in the library environment to create a notebook by clicking the 'Item type' drop box.
At the moment, it supports Python(2.7, 3.5, 3.6), R and F#. If you are fussy about organisation, it also allows you to create a folder instead and then create your files. In addition to creating new files, you can also load files from a URL or from your computer.
That's not all! The notebook file on azure has a cool slide presentation feature called the RISE Slideshow.
This RISE Slideshow is a notebook extension which allows you to use it for presentations. To enable Slide mode:
In your notebook click View/Cell Toolbar/Slide Show
For each cell select its type and hierarchy on the right hand side
To start the presentation, click the "graph" icon (shown above) on the main toolbar. Use left/right/up/down to navigate slides.
This automatically turns your notebook into a slide presentation!
The coolest thing about this azure notebooks is it's all on the cloud. This means that you can present using any computer/laptop (even if there's no python installed). And because of this, you do not need to pip install any library on the local machine. It's all done on the cloud
Note that your packages will only be available for the lifetime of your notebook server and your notebook server will typically shutdown after 1 hour of inactivity.
Azure Notebooks also lets you auto-setup your environment if you have a pip requirements file.
There's so much to it and I'll just let you explore!
I hope this is as useful for you as it was (and still is) for me. Let me know if you've used this before and what you like or do not like about it. For suggestions on other platforms especially for beginners to use for Python/R, see this post by Laura Da Silva