Do these quotes sound familiar?
“I only want to see three slides.”
“My boss says we get one slide per presenter.”
“We don’t want to go over 20 slides for this presentation.”
It’s very common to be restricted to a certain number of slides in a presentation. And it’s a very silly way to do things.
Comparing apples to oranges
Just as the stating the ability to do the Kessel Run in under 12 parsecs (You’re welcome, nerds!) is a nonsensical description of speed, specifying the number of slides in a presentation in order to limit its duration is meaningless. The number of slides in your presentation actually can have very little to do with how long your presentation lasts. I once saw a 45-minute presentation that consisted of just one slide. Conversely, I usually develop about 60–75 slides for a 45-minute presentation.
The right question isn’t “How many slides should my presentation have?” it’s “How long does this presentation need to be?” Then you match that time to your presentation style and use that as a guide for how many slides you’ll need to create.
How can a presentation have just one slide?
The one-slide presenter worked the room like a master. He spoke to us like he was addressing a roomful of friends. He was animated and enthusiastic, moving back and forth to engage the whole audience. He wove in stories based on his own personal experience. The funny thing was that his subject matter—a specific type of industrial machine—could have been as boring as dirt, yet he made it seem like the coolest thing ever.
What was on his slide? His company’s name, his name, and his contact information.
Why would a 45-minute presentation need 60–75 slides?
So if this guy can get away with one slide, why do I need so many for my own presentation that lasts the same amount of time? Well, since I teach people how to get the most out of PowerPoint, my presentations tend to contain a lot of animation, slides with very few words, and slides that illustrate only one idea apiece. The effect for the audience is seamless: everything flows much like a film. But this style tends to require a lot more slides than a more static presentation style.
Push back!
The next time somebody tells you to limit your presentation to a certain number of slides, push back and ask for more information about how long you have to present. If you’re unable to sway the opinion of the person who’s made this ridiculous request, then feel free to throw me under the bus by saying:
There’s a PowerPoint expert I follow named Laura Foley. She says that the number of slides in a presentation doesn’t matter, as long as you stay within the allotted time. And I wouldn’t argue with her, because she can make the Kessel Run in under 12 parsecs.
Clearly time available is the proper issue, not the max or minimum number of slides.
Some people I work with in a particular company understand this, but their boss doesn’t. As a result, they’re asked to present using only three slides, which drives them crazy!
Glad I don’t work for that company!
What is a “slide” anyway? It can mean many different things to different people. At the end of the day, it’s a blank canvass onto which anything from white space to a photo, video or a complex chunk of visual data may be placed. A single slide could be displayed for an hour or a fraction of a second.
To make my point, I once developed a client “presentation” in PowerPoint that was output as a 2 minute video anecdotal story and then embedded back into another slide to make sure the story was always told the same way by numerous presenters. One “scene” contained a film counter winding back in time to illustrate the concept of “let’s look back at what happened”. That played for 10 seconds and contained 100 slides!
Of course I get the point of a manager asking for 3 slides but in that case, they should just ask for the information in a Word doc before the meeting and then have a human discussion once all attendees have read the input. I’ve seen that work in a few companies where “presenting” internally is banned.