Some Data on the Current Use of PowerPoint – Word Counts (1)

This post is an excerpt from “Visu­al Log­or­rhea – On the Preva­lence of Slideu­ments”. In order to get an impres­sion of the cur­rent use of Pow­er­Point for pre­sen­ta­tion design, 1.500 pre­sen­ta­tions found on the inter­net have been ana­lyzed. Read the full sto­ry here.

Word Counts

Nan­cy Duarte – refer­ring to and fur­ther spec­i­fy­ing Garr Reynolds’ crit­ics on slideu­ments – dif­fer­en­ti­ates between slides packed with “more than 75 words” and thus being a “doc­u­ment or white­paper”, slides con­tain­ing “50 or so words” which “serve as a tele­prompter” and “true pre­sen­ta­tions” which “rein­force the con­tent visu­al­ly”.​¹

10.7% of all slides in the sam­ple are what Nan­cy Duarte calls a “teleprompter” (50 – 69 words), 9.2% are what she defined as a “doc­u­ment” (70 or more words). This def­i­nite­ly does not mean that the remain­ing about 80% of the slides are high­ly visu­al or suit­able as a good sup­port for the orat­ed speech. From the author’s expe­ri­ence, a high­ly visu­al slide as sug­gest­ed by most authors cit­ed in this pub­li­ca­tion does not need (or have space for) more than a cou­ple of words; in fact, most of them fol­low Godin’s advice. Sub­tract­ing the 8% title slides, it is safe to say that only about a fifth of all slides in the sam­ple might meet that cri­te­ria, where­as at min­i­mum anoth­er fifth is to be con­sid­ered a slideument.

This post is an excerpt from “Visu­al Log­or­rhea – On the Preva­lence of Slideu­ments”. In order to get an impres­sion of the cur­rent use of Pow­er­Point for pre­sen­ta­tion design, 1.500 pre­sen­ta­tions found on the inter­net have been ana­lyzed. Read the full sto­ry here.