Some Data on the Current Use of PowerPoint – Slide 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.

Slide Counts

About half of the pre­sen­ta­tion files in the sam­ple con­tain 20 slides or less. An aver­age pre­sen­ta­tion con­sists of x̄ = 25.4 slides with a surpris­ingly high spread (s = 23.7) and a medi­an of Md = 20. Only about 10% of the slide decks are larg­er than 45 slides.

Guy Kawasaki’s advice of a max­i­mum of ten slides is only met by 19.4% of the pre­sen­ta­tions. This find­ing is not remark­able at all, because Kawasaki’s rec­om­men­da­tion clear­ly focus­es on pitch­es held in front of ven­ture cap­i­tal­ists – a focus which might be shared by very few of the pre­sen­ta­tions in the sam­ple analyzed.

The fact that there are only a few very long pre­sen­ta­tions is almost cer­tain­ly relat­ed to the obvi­ous truth that time con­straints are the lim­it­ing fac­tor for pre­sen­ta­tion length (and con­se­quent­ly are an indi­rect lim­it for the slide count). This lim­it appears to be wide­ly under­stood by peo­ple cre­at­ing slide decks.

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.