Some Data on the Current Use of PowerPoint – Word Counts (2)

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

On an aver­age slide, there are x̄ = 30.8 words with a very high spread (s = 31.0) and a medi­an of Md = 24.

Though this seems to be a high num­ber of words per slide, it is far less than what Edward Tufte found (a Medi­an of Md = 40) – a dis­crepancy which almost sure­ly is relat­ed to the fact that Tufte lim­it­ed his analy­sis to “text-only slides”, where­as this analy­sis is based on a cor­pus of entire pre­sen­ta­tions.​¹ Lim­it­ing the sam­ple to slides of lay­out “Object” (see chap­ter “Slide Lay­outs” on p. 13) con­tain­ing exact­ly two shapes with text (a sub­set of the sam­ple which should almost match Tufte’s sam­ple cri­te­ria), the medi­an is Md = 35 (x̄ = 41.1, s= 30.5). Remem­ber­ing Tufte’s crit­ic on “[…] much low­er rates of infor­ma­tion trans­mis­sion than the talk itself […]”, these even low­er num­bers sup­port Tufte’s find­ings.​²

Only about a quar­ter (23.1%) of all slides hon­or Seth Godin’s advice not to have more than six words on a slide.​³ Tak­ing into account that about 8% of all slides in the sam­ple are title slides (accord­ing to their slide lay­out, see below), we can clear­ly state that vir­tu­al­ly nobody fol­lows his rec­om­men­da­tion. Whether it is real­is­tic or not – it is ignored.

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.