How many PowerPoint slides will allow for ~45 minutes of talking time?

Good advice no many how slides you end up with.

“How many slides” is like when highschoolers ask “how many pages does my report have to be”.

There’s no way to answer that question. I’ve seen powerpoint slides that have nothing more than 2 bullet-point statements per slide, and I’ve seen powerpoint slides have pages of information per slide.

It is about the content, not the number of slides.

I disagree. A good powerpoint slide can’t have lots of information for 2 reasons. 1st it’s too hard to read. Stick with a max 6 word down and across. The 2nd reason is with too many slides or too much info it will take peoples attention off you and make the screen the star. Use slides liberally and don’t steal attention from yourself

I didn’t say I’d seen good slides with pages of information per slide…

Haha, I agree with skabeep. I was asking this question assuming that the collective would understand I know how to make a good PowerPoint. With the correct amount of information per slide, I was looking for an average that would create approximately 45 minutes of talking time.

Edward Tufte says that you don’t need any words on powerpoint slides. Outlines of the talk can be handed out on paper. Save the slides for important information: data, pictures, illustrations of what you are talking.

People hate powerpoint presentations because they are tedious. No one wants to keep on reading the talk. There’s no need. That’s what the speaker is supposed to be doing.

When I make a presentation, I try to put as many “pretty pictures” in it as I can. Maps. Pictures of places I’m talking about. Illustrations of concepts I’m talking about, anything that can’t be conveyed through speech (oral or written).

Tufte also allows about five minutes per slide if you do it this way. There is a lot of information on the slide to talk about, and the slide complements your talk, and lets people get the same information through a different sensory channel. You shouldn’t need more than 9 or 10 slides using this method.

Whatever you do—if you opt for wordy, boring slides—please do not do the one slide a minute job. Shudder!

Good luck! Hey, what’s the talk about?

@daloon: lol, I see at least 6 PowerPoint talks every week. I know how they go and what works and what doesn’t. My slides are mainly figures and illustrations. So, we’re on the same page!

The talk is about psychophysical measurement of perceived head direction and eye-gaze in peripheral vision. In other words, how do people determine the “object of focus” of another person when unable to look at him or her directly? It’s a complex mental calculation that I’ll be breaking down in my talk.

“how do people determine the “object of focus” of another person when unable to look at him or her directly?”

—

Isn’t the “object of focus” usually her breasts? It’s not that complex to figure out. ツ

A good rule of thumb is 1 minute per slide. Tangentially, I agree with Daloon that text on slides for the most part is tedious. There is nothing worse than going to a presentation to watch a speaker read the entire talk off of her slides. Boringgggggg.

One other thing. Practice, practice, practice until you can do the talk in your sleep. In particular, practice the intro (hardest part to get through and most speakers are most nervous at the start) and the transitions between slides.

So what? A research question slide (demonstrates the concept of “object of focus”). A methods slide (picture of your data gathering technique). A data source slide (pictures of the subjects—oops, probably not—IRB problems). Then you’ve got your results slides, and if you have numbers, one of them has numbers, and if there are statistical analyses, you should show them the regression equations, together with a graph. And then, if you have any data collected, say via video, you could show some examples of what you are talking about. A flow chart of the mental calculation process, that you will spend a lot of time talking about, perhaps with illustrations of various steps in the process.

And how do you get to 6 every week? You hardly have time to do your own work!

@daloon: Yep, that’s pretty much what I’ve got!

Haha, yeah, there are so many journal clubs and presentation days… they occur at noon every day of the week (and Thursday is two half-hour presentations).

@GOS and daloon. I too could attend numerous seminars weekly (at least 10, if I so chose). These days, I only go to 4–5, in order to limit my time spent sitting on my ass. What I often find appalling is when I go to a seminar by a famous scientist (like a NAS member or Nobel laureate), and the talk stinks. I’m almost as fascinated by the lengths someone will go to to give a bad talk as I am by the great talks.

@GoS: you know, I realized you probably had that, but I’d pressed submit. Actually, the reason I was doing it was to count slides, and I never did that.

Still you seem very well versed in all this. What were you hoping to get out of the question?

@shilolo: you think they deliberately try to make them bad? Or is that sarcasm? Sigh. I wish I could hear your voice saying that.

@daloon: Actually, this is just for a journal club, so it’s not my original research. I’m just presenting another group’s paper.

@daloon. Sarcasm… Sometimes the talks are so bad, it seems as if the speaker was trying to make it bad. I know that isn’t true, but it leaves me wondering how such awful communicators are such successful scientists.

@GOS. Next time, you can present one of my papers… ;-)

The fewer, the better. If all your content is on the slides, why would the audience listen to you – and if they don’t listen to you, they won’t remember you.

- Have as many slides as you have messages.
– Use Bullet Points – Ideally no more than 3–5 one-liners on each slide
– One graph = one slide

You could use as many as 60 (any more than 1 per minute and you’ll be too busy flicking to deliver your presentation – and the audience too busy watching the flicker to listen) – or as few as 6 (1: Title, 2: Agenda, 3: Speaking points, 4: Summary, 5: Q&A, 6: “Thank You”)

Plan your talk, and then use the slides to show graphic and visual data that supports your points. There’s no simplistic “a new slide every 5 minutes” rule that will work; trying to come up with one will result in chartjunk.

In particular, repeating your points in text on the slides is inane. Sure, it gives you something to do (click to the next slide), but it loses your audience, because they read the slide faster than you can, and then wait impatiently for the next one.

Geez, everyone. I know how to make a PowerPoint presentation! I do not overcrowd my slides with text, I do not read off my slides, I use mostly visual aids, etc.!

I was not asking for PowerPoint advice. I am well-versed in PowerPoint presenting.

I was simply trying to get an idea of your opinion on the following:
Provided that I make the correct kind of slides, approximately how many of these proper kind of slides should I include in a ~45-minute presentation? Clearly, regardless of how well you make a presentation, the number of slides will vary dependent upon whether you are giving a 10-minute overview of a research proposal or a 3-hour job talk!!

The presentation I will be giving on Wednesday is not a big deal, and there is no need for me to rehearse (it’s a casual journal club—all I’m doing is presenting a random article for us to talk about). I haven’t given a presentation of this specific length in awhile, so I was just asking for a quick estimate of how many proper slides would be appropriate because, as I was creating the presentation, I was having a difficult time gauging whether it was going to take me 15 minutes or 2 hours to run through it.

@GOS. Don’t get so upset. Your description in the question didn’t make it clear that this was a low-key JC presentation, so you got some advice pertaining to bigger presentations.

For a journal club presentation, I typically use ~5–10 slides to introduce the topic for the group. Why is it interesting to you? What is the background? What experiments led to this paper? This is your opportunity to explain why you picked the paper, and why the audience should be interested too.

Then, I just use the figures from the paper (occasionally interspersed with supplementary figures or other info such as diagrams depicting complicated or new techniques) broken up into manageable chunks. Sometimes I’ll even rearrange the order of the figures if I think the authors didn’t organize the paper well, or if it suits the flow of the presentation. Typically, this will be another 5–10 slides.

Lastly, I try to coalesce the information with what is known in the field, and try to identify new questions that arise from the paper. This is usually 1–2 slides. So, in total, for an informal JC, anywhere from 10–25 slides. Good luck and have fun.

@shilolo: Very helpful answer, thank you!

I really should have specified the nature of this presentation, but I figured that the majority of the collective has not been in journal club situations.

That sounds like a perfect layout for my presentation! It’s pretty much what I have. I’m thankful for screenshots from the PDF of the article. :)

@GOS. Lots of journals now allow you to download the figures in powerpoint form already. Or, you can just download the figures from the web (sometimes that gives better resolution than a screenshot from the PDF). I find that cropping the figures from the PDF gives the best results, but then you need Adobe Pro.

There’s a reason the slides are referred to as the visual aid to the presentation – rather than the presentation being the audial aid to the slides.

I don’t think it’s ever ideal to base the timing of your presentation on the number of slides. You’ll need as many slides as you need visuals to make your points.

girlofscience: you should include enough images to get your point across.

How many images do you need to get your point across? That’s the question. It doesn’t lend itself to a number like “1 every 5 minutes” or “42.” It depends on the content of your talk, and on the formality level of your presentation.

I recently gave a 3 hour presentation that was 6 slides

I am at this webpage because my lecturer at university used 87 slides in 1.5 hrs…Painful!!! What is the point?! I don’t see the point of having a powerpoint where you skip through slides, tell people that some slides are not important and jump over them, have so much dense information that you would need a powerpoint presentation just for that slide! It is quite tragic for sure! :o(

It’s depends of how much ideas and theses will be in your presentation.
You’ll achieve better results if you’ll use one slide for one thesis.
Actually, check this facebook page https://www.facebook.com/PoweredTemplate for #PresentationTips tag