LaTeX (beamer) — Is there a way to suppress the caption label of “Figure X:” or “Table X:”?

Question

I am making a beamer presentation of someone else's research paper (so I don't have the original tex code). I am using pdfs of tables in the presentation but wanted to cut out all of the original captions, which can be a bit wordy for a slideshow, and simply label them with either "Table X" or "Figure X" along with the title.

So I'd like to suppress automatically inserted caption label (otherwise it would say "Figure: Table I", and so on). If I put the title/label without the \caption{} function, then I have to fight with word wrapping.

Answer 1

Unless each member of the audience is expected to have a printed copy of the paper to follow while you do your presentation, I think it doesn't make a lot of sense to number your Figures/Tables in the presentation. How about just keeping something like "Figure: Some short title" with the standard captioning facilities from beamer?

If for some reason you really, really want to include the number of each figure/table as it appeared on the original document, you could manually redefine \figurename before issuing each \caption command to include the appropriate number. For example:

\begin{figure}
% your figure goes here

\def\figurename{Figure 1}
\caption{Some short title}
\end{figure}

Answer 2

This to me seems a better/cleaner solution:

\usepackage{caption}
\captionsetup{labelformat=empty,labelsep=none}