Use the Right Number of Slides

How many slides should you have? That depends on your audience, the technology you’re using, the setting you’re in, your own sense of pacing, and how comfortable you are with a clicker. Some presenters could spend an hour on three slides; others could go through 200 or more and you’d never know it.

Consider these slide-count variables as you’re creating your presentation.

No slides

If you need to make a very personal connection with your audience or you’re delivering a short talk in a casual environment, go without slides. They don’t work in every situation. As Andrew Dlugan says in his “Six Minutes” blog about public speaking, presenters shouldn’t use slides in a commencement speech, a eulogy, a wedding toast, or a layoff announcement. If you’re unsure whether they’re appropriate, bring them with you but also carry a printout of your slide notes in case you decide when you arrive that it’s best to leave your laptop off.

Moderate slide count

Some experts recommend 1 to 2 slides per minute, or 30 to 60 slides for an hour-long talk. That’s about the average count in corporate presentations—but most of them cram too much information on each slide. If you’ve broken your content down to one idea per slide (see “Story-board One Idea per Slide” earlier in the Slides section), you may end up with more than 60.

High slide count

Some presenters use 5 slides per minute. This rapid-fire style keeps the audience extra alert because people will visually reengage with each click—but it requires a lot of rehearsal and careful pacing. In a 40-minute talk, I typically use 145 slides. (If you count “builds” within each slide—where I reveal bullets one at a time, and so forth—I click up to 300 times.) But when I ask audiences how many slides they think I used, they usually say between 30 and 50.

Social media slide count

The most popular presentations on social media sites like slideshare.comhave more than 75 slides that you can read in 2 to 3 minutes. They also tend to be built like children’s books—sentence, visual, sentence, visual—to facilitate quick clicking.

Don’t worry about slide count. Just make your slides count.