Some Data on the Current Use of PowerPoint – Line Counts

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.

Line Counts

An aver­age slide in our sam­ple has x̄ = 8 lines of text (s = 6.8, Md = 8), and about half of the slides (49.0%) have sev­en or less lines of text and hence hon­or the “rule” of the “mag­i­cal num­ber sev­en”. Only 10% are packed with 15 or more lines of text. Remem­ber­ing that 8% of the slides are title slides (see above), we can con­clude that near­ly two thirds of the slides are packed with too much text and thus almost cer­tain­ly dis­tract from the spo­ken content.

Sur­pris­ing­ly, there is no cor­re­la­tion between the num­ber of slides in a pre­sen­ta­tion and the aver­age num­ber of words per slide (r = 0.0178). There is nei­ther an indi­ca­tion that peo­ple forced to present only a lim­it­ed amount of slides tend to put more con­tent on their slides nor that peo­ple cre­at­ing pre­sen­ta­tions made of many slides also incline towards using many words on their slides.

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.

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