How many powerpoint slides should i have

Your visuals, including PowerPoint, are merely the tools you use to convey your message to your audience. You have a home improvement project for which a hammer would be helpful. A rule, of course, can be helpful in offering specific guidance and an easy guideline to follow when putting together your presentation.

But, this not always a helpful rule. Presenters who pack slides worth of information onto 60 slides for an hourlong presentation certainly follow the rule, but likely produce a cluttered mess.

And, in all likelihood, no one wants to look at 60 packed slides in an hour. Your presentation is also about making a connection with your audience. That connection is established and re-established every time your audience turns their attention from your slides back to you. A slower pace can help foster that connection, as well as allow your audience to better digest and process the information you are sharing.

The audience gasped. The proper number of slides per minute can best be answered like this: It should be the right amount to help you achieve your goals.

That could be four or dozens. Say you head an international relief organization, and you want to convey the magnitude of a recent disaster and the individual cases of need. You might quickly click through dozens of images of devastated areas to show the massive degree of need and then settle for several minutes on a single image of just one family that is struggling to survive.

Your slides help to personalize what might seem to be an overwhelming task. Maybe, you want your audience to focus on a big-picture view, rather than dwell on minutia. So, you only show a half-dozen slides, with one or two words, writ large, that reflect your most important themes. But when speakers fill almost every centimeter of their slides with words, bullets, and graphics, they give the audience no sense of priority.

Cluttered slides make it impossible for the audience to know where to look first. This slide, from one of our public speaking workshops , is a good example of a slide with plenty of white space. What is the goal of PowerPoint? The main goal — as with all communication — is to transfer information, knowledge, or inspiration from you to your audience.

Words on a screen can do those things, but not nearly as well as an inspired presenter who uses simple graphics and visuals to reinforce the most important points. A great image teamed with a simple message is remembered far longer than a list of a half-dozen bullet points.

Many presenters print their PowerPoint presentations and distribute them to the audience as a takeaway document. Slideuments fail in both roles; they lack the detail required by a written document but are too cluttered to serve as an effective visual. Slides are not meant for double duty. The best solution is to separate the two. There are exceptions, but handouts that are dense with material rarely make for gripping visuals. For instance, say you are a nutritionist who is talking to an audience looking for tips to lose weight.

The following slide would certainly be helpful as a take-home guide, but probably a bit much to take in during the presentation itself. Among the top PowerPoint mistakes, this is one that many presenters have been guilty of at one point or another.

Many of our trainees confess to using slides as their personal speaking notes. If you see your slides as sticky notes for your presentation, your audience likely will, too. Slides are intended to help the audience remember your information — not to help you remember your own information. Again, the slides only appear for a few seconds at a time. The special feature: all slides contain only one or a few words in a large font.

This method provides the presenter with key points which can make presentation tools, such as index cards unnecessary. Of course, this method is not recommended for presentations that require images, graphics or other similar visual material.

As you can see, there are many different approaches and ideas. Which method is the right one for you? The answer is up to you. If one of these methods and its defined guidelines works well for you, use it! Otherwise, pick and choose what you like from it and adapt it to your presentation. The biggest stumbling block in presentations is usually not the slide presentation itself, but the uncertainty of the presenter.

Your listeners have probably given presentations themselves and are familiar with the challenges. Stay poised and be yourself. A perfect but lifeless presentation often makes less of an impact than one with personality and a few rough edges.

Your email address will not be published. Menu Skip to content. Stay Connected Search. June 9, Presenting with PowerPoint: How many slides are ideal? Seven rules for choosing the right number of slides for your presentations Quality over quantity A wealth of detailed information can impress people, but also overwhelm and bore them. Stick to your key points without getting bogged down in details. You can always take the time to clarify any ambiguities.

As much as necessary, but as little as possible This is where efficiency really comes into play. Practice makes perfect! Things to keep in mind: The topic. The number of slides that are required and helpful in presentations depends greatly on the topic. For example, pictures or graphics are best suited if you want to explain technical processes, discuss building progress or new products, or present business figures and statistics.

It makes little sense to cut down on relevant content just to keep the number of slides low. If your topic is a bit dry, visual material can help keep your audience interested.

The audience. Who your audience is plays a factor in how many slides you need. Trust your own expertise! Expert opinions: helpful, but not mandatory You can of course reference well-known presentation methods if you feel more confident using a given guideline. The main difference is that you can add a couple more of your important points to the agenda.

If you are a new speaker, I suggest that most minute talks cover five main points. You can use the same technique as in the minute talk.

Start with an introduction slide with an overview of all five bullet points. On your internal slides, just cover the single main idea for each bullet. You will have five internal slides. Then, end with your summary slide with the main concepts one more time. For the more seasoned presenter, you can use just three main bullet points but add an extra relevant story to each point. The more that you use this technique the easier you will find it to fit your content into the correct presentation length.

For instance, if you find yourself rushing at the end without enough time to finish, you can give fewer details in your stories. If you finish early, you can add more details into your examples and stories. For a minute presentation, use five bullet points and seven slides.

This time insert a couple of different stories as evidence of each bullet point. On each of the internal slides, give your audience an example of yourself or someone else who did the opposite of the point.

Then, follow up with a good example. If I were to use the technique to prove the point that you need seven slides for an hour presentation, I could use the following….

Bad Example : A few years ago, I went to a three-day seminar where the presenter taught about how to market to universities. On the first morning, his team gave each of us a three-ring binder with hundreds of pages. I was actually pretty excited as I scanned the binder. It was full of a ton of great information.

During the first hour, the speaker gave us over 50 great tips and techniques. This is a great guide, for those lacking confidence, to use as a starting point. It is not a rule. Now, this is a much more complicated question, and one that will change for every presentation. In our role as guides in this scenario, we want to give you a tangible answer to your query, not simply introduce more questions, and more confusion, into the mix.

Frustration and confusion are not our goals. We just respect you too much to lie to you. It might look something like this:. This is where we get into the real juicy bit of storytelling. Your audience might have one challenge, they might have 50, which is where the ambiguity kicks back in.

Each challenge needs its own slide, and each solution does too. If your audience does have 50 challenges, try to find common themes between them, so you can address them as a cohesive group, all under one idea umbrella. You also need to apply to logic and establish credibility. Again, this could take one slide, or it could take nine, but here is some general guidance:. Just a gentle reminder of the immense benefits they will receive by working with you. And finally, your end slide should be, as the name suggests, one slide with a powerful call to action.

To find out more about how to leave a lasting impression on every audience you encounter, take a look at this article.