A common question people often ask me is how many slides should I use? There is no real answer to this, obviously. How many pages make for a good book? How much sugar should you put in coffee? It always depends on what your story is or who is having it. Your slideshow is quite the same.

There is no magic number which will ensure a good slideshow. Think of who will view your presentation. Each occasion will call for more or less slides. A great option that you will find in Power Point and Keynote is hide slide. This allows you to make a slideshow and decide before giving the presentation which slides you will show. This way you won’t have to design several slideshows for the same topic, instead you decide which slides you will use for each occasion.

Think of your audience, if you have too many slides they might be overwhelmed, if you have to few they might be bored. This is not the same as to say shoot for the middle. There is no middle here. Just try to put yourself in your audience’s shoes and think which pace would make them feel most comfortable.

I’ve seen many good presentations (and many bad ones, unfortunately) some with fast pace speakers which switch slides every minute and others that went on for 20 minutes with just 3 slides (or no slides at all). Each speaker is different and you have to find the style that you, as a speaker and with your audience in mind, are more comfortable with.

Check out different styles from speakers, you can go from Sir Ken Robinson’s no slide talks, to a Pecha Kucha style presentation, where they use exactly 20 slides, showing each one for 20 seconds.

Until next time,

Byron Stanford for Project Presentation.

Related posts:

1. When not to do a presentation
2. How to rehearse a presentation
3. Concept Slides