powerpoint presentation slides limit

How Many Slides Can You Have in MS PowerPoint? (A Guide to the Maximum)

Creating a presentation can be a daunting task, especially when youre using Microsoft PowerPoint.

Knowing the limitations of your tools can make the process of creating a presentation much easier.

In this guide, well explore the maximum number of slides you can have in a PowerPoint presentation, the different types of slides available, and the benefits of using PowerPoint.

Read on to learn the ins and outs of creating the perfect PowerPoint presentation!

Short Answer

There is no specific number of slides that are required in a Microsoft PowerPoint presentation.

It depends on the content of the presentation and the purpose of the presentation.

What is Microsoft PowerPoint?

Microsoft PowerPoint is a powerful presentation software program developed by Microsoft.

It is used to create professional-looking presentations that are often used for business meetings, educational lectures, and other group events.

PowerPoint also includes a variety of templates and themes to choose from, as well as a selection of backgrounds and layouts.

All of these features make PowerPoint a great tool to create engaging and professional-looking presentations.

What is the Maximum Number of Slides in PowerPoint?

When it comes to creating a presentation in Microsoft PowerPoint, there is no definitive answer to the question of how many slides can you have.

For example, the latest version of PowerPoint, PowerPoint 365, allows you to create up to 100 slides in a single presentation.

In addition to the number of slides you can have in your presentation, you should also consider the amount of content you will include in each slide.

The more content you include in each slide, the fewer slides you can have in total.

For example, if you have more detailed slides with more text, images, and other elements, your presentation may only include around 20 slides.

When it comes to the maximum number of slides you can have in PowerPoint, it is important to remember that the limit is only limited by your creativity and the amount of content you wish to include in your presentation.

Different Types of Slides in PowerPoint

Microsoft PowerPoint offers a variety of slides to choose from, depending on the type of presentation you are creating.

The most common type of slide is the title slide, which is used to introduce the topic of the presentation.

Other types of slides include diagrams, charts, and graphs, which are used to illustrate data or complex concepts.

You can also create slides with images and multimedia, such as videos or audio clips, for a more engaging presentation.

Benefits of Using PowerPoint

Microsoft PowerPoint is an incredibly versatile presentation software that has countless benefits for businesses and individuals alike.

Not only can PowerPoint help create a stunning presentation, but it also provides tools to help users organize their content and keep track of their progress.

With PowerPoint, users also have the advantage of being able to share their presentations with ease.

Presentations can be shared via a link or exported as a PDF, allowing them to be accessed from any device with an internet connection.

Finally, PowerPoint allows users to save their presentations in the cloud, making them easily accessible from any device.

With PowerPoint, there is no limit to the number of slides users can create, and the software provides users with the ability to customize their presentations and collaborate with others.

Tips for Creating and Using PowerPoint Slides

1. Establish a clear purpose Before you begin creating your presentation, establish a clear purpose and topic. This will help you determine how many slides you need and the content that should be included on each one.

4. Use animations Animations can help bring your slides to life and make them more interesting. However, it is important to use animations judiciously and only when necessary.

These tips can help you create engaging and informative presentations with PowerPoint.

By carefully considering the number of slides you have available and using the tips above, you can ensure your presentation is successful.

What Can You Do if You Need More Slides?

The first option is to break up your presentation into multiple presentations.

Another option is to create custom slide masters that contain multiple pages within a single slide.

Finally, you can also make use of third-party add-ons or extensions to increase the number of slides you can create in PowerPoint.

With the right tools and an eye for creativity, you can create an unlimited number of slides in your PowerPoint presentation.

What File Types Can You Use?

Popular file types include PowerPoints native PPT and PPTX, as well as more general-purpose file types such as PDF and HTML.

PPT and PPTX are the two most common file types used with PowerPoint.

PDFs are a popular file type for presentations because they are portable and can be opened on any computer, regardless of the software its running.

This allows users to easily insert images into their presentations without having to convert them to a different format.

Final Thoughts

With these tips in mind, you can create an effective, engaging, and visually appealing presentation with PowerPoint that will leave a lasting impression.

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Microsoft 365 Life Hacks > Presentations > How many slides does your presentation need?

How many slides does your presentation need?

When you’re creating a presentation, it’s important to consider the amount of information you’re sharing with your audience. You don’t want to overwhelm them, but you also want to be comprehensive and ensure that you’re covering all your bases. Whether you’re giving a 10, 15, or 30-minute presentation, see how many slides your presentation needs to get your point across.

Rules and guidance for PowerPoint presentations

PowerPoint is a powerful visual aid for introducing data, statistics, and new concepts to any audience. In PowerPoint, you can create as many slides as you want—which might sound tempting at first. But length doesn’t always guarantee a successful presentation . Most presentations last around 10-15 minutes, and anything longer than that (such as a 30-minute presentation) may have additional visual aids or speakers to enhance your message.

A handy rule to keep in mind is to spend about 1-2 minutes on each slide. This will give you ample time to convey your message, let data sink in, and allow you to memorize your presentation . When you limit each slide to this length of time, you also need to be selective about how much information you put on each slide and avoid overloading your audience.

For 10-minute presentations

Ten minutes is usually considered the shortest amount of time you need for a successful presentation. For a shorter 10-minute presentation, you’ll need to be selective with your content. Limit your slide count to approximately 7 to 10 slides.

For 15-minute presentations

When preparing for a 15-minute presentation, concise and focused content is key. Aim for around 10 to 15 slides to maintain a good pace, which will fit with the 1-2 minute per slide rule.

For 30-minute presentations

A longer presentation gives you more room to delve deeper into your topic. But to maintain audience engagement, you’ll need to add interactivity , audience participation, and elements like animations . Aim for around 20 to 30 slides, allowing for a balanced distribution of content without overwhelming your audience.

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Using the 10-20-30 rule

The 10-20-30 rule is an effective way to structure your presentation. It calls for no more than 10 slides and no longer than 20 minutes (as well as a 30-point font).

Tips for crafting an effective presentation

No matter how long a presentation is, there are guidelines for crafting one to enhance understanding and retention. Keep these tips in mind when creating your PowerPoint masterpiece:

• Avoid overload: Ensure that each slide communicates a single idea clearly, avoiding cluttered layouts or excessive text.
• Pay attention to structure: Think of slides as bullet points with introductions, endings, and deep dives within each subject.
• Add visual appeal: Incorporate images, charts, and graphics to convey information without using too many words to make your audience read.
• Engage with your audience: Encourage interaction through questions, polls, or storytelling techniques to keep your audience actively involved.
• Put in the practice: Familiarize yourself with your slides and practice your delivery to refine your timing and confidence.

Ultimately, the ideal number of slides for your presentation depends on the allocated time frame and how detailed your content is. By striking a balance between informative content and engaging delivery, you can create a compelling presentation that can teach your audience something new.

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How Many PowerPoint Slides Does a Presentation Need?

Maybe you’ve been in this situation: A colleague is giving a presentation. While he’s talking, you’re shown a huge number of slides; the information literally flies past you. While you’re still thinking about the third slide, he’s already moved on to slide seventeen. Or vice versa: A 60-minute presentation is supported by a few short slides. It’s difficult to follow the presentation and keep track of information because there is basically no visual support.

Neither of these two presentations makes much of an impact. And the presenter doesn’t necessarily do himself any favors either. This shows that choosing the right number of slides in presentations is pretty important.

Presenting with PowerPoint: How many slides are ideal?

First of all: there’s no magic number. Nobody can tell you, “A new slide every two minutes is the secret to success.”  Every presentation is unique. Every presenter has his or her own goals and needs. And, every presentation situation is different.

So, although it’s ultimately up to you to decide on the right number of slides for your presentation, there are a few guidelines you can follow.

Seven rules for choosing the right number of slides for your presentations

Quality over quantity.

Presentation slides should never be a constant flow of data and text. Your audience should be listening to you, not reading. When everything you say is also presented on your slides, it becomes pretty redundant.

A good presentation slide should provide an overview of the key points or augment them with audio-visual material. It should support the presentation, not become it. Keep it clear and brief.

Portion out your information

We’ve become used to everything coming to us quickly and automatically. But communicating information doesn’t always work like that. Compare it to a good meal. Instead of piling it all up and eating it in one bite, savoring every bite is a much more enjoyable experience.

And that’s exactly how you should communicate information during your presentation. It’s “more appetizing” and “easier to swallow” for the listener if it’s portioned out. Just because you have enough space on a slide for several important points doesn’t mean you have to use them all. Distribute important points over several slides to emphasize their importance and focus the audience’s attention on them.

For example, if you are referring to a product range, don’t list product A, product B and product C on one slide, but create a single slide for each. These can then be enhanced with pictures or keywords. This of course increases the number of your presentation slides, but it maximizes their impact.

As much as necessary, but as little as possible

This is where efficiency really comes into play. It’s all about making sensible cuts. Slides can and should support a presentation. They can provide a guideline, provide additional visual information or simply relax the presentation a bit. As already mentioned, text should not play too much of a role on your slides.

Always question the purpose of material, such as pictures or graphics, and how useful they are for your presentation. Ger rid of anything that seems superfluous or unnecessary or that can be communicated verbally.

What is useful and what can be cut is of course up to you to decide! Although a cartoon or caricature might not be relevant to your topic, it could be a fun way to loosen things up.

Also keep in mind that the number and detail of your slides will affect hoe flexible you can be during the presentation. You are locked into your slides and their content, and the more of them you have, the less chance you have to diverge from them. This can help if you are feeling a little shaky or nervous. But keep this in mind if you’re someone who likes a bit of leeway and to talk freely.

• Practice makes perfect!

We love telling kids to practice things they don’t feel confident about. So why don’t we that ourselves? A great way to see if a presentation works is to run through it at least once in advance – kind of like a dress rehearsal.

Doing this in front of friends or family can provide you with valuable feedback. But even alone in front of a mirror or with an imaginary audience can work. You’ll quickly see where the problems lie, whether you have enough time and whether the slides fit into the presentation.

If you find that your presentation is finished faster than planned, you can add additional information and slides. If, on the other hand, you had problems completing the presentation within the allotted time and couldn’t discuss individual slides or had to skip them, it’s time to make some cuts.

Naturally, the pace at which you speak plays a big role. Those who speak quickly can cover lots of slides in a short time. If you speak slowly, you will of course achieve less. Ideally, you should speak at a pace that is comfortable for the listeners and allows them to follow the presentation. Again, this takes practice! No matter how quickly or slowly you speak, you should be able to present your slides comfortably.

Less is more

Some presenters like to keep a few slides “on ice” just in case there is time left or they feel they haven’t covered everything. This is an option but not really recommended. If the extra slides in your presentation are skipped over, the audience can easily feel that you’re cutting things short and they’re missing something that may be important.

On the other hand, there are also presenters who opt for a minimalist approach to their slides to allow for flexibility or to simplify their presentation. Even this can be irritating or distracting to the audience, as they’re not getting enough visual content.

There should be neither too many nor too few slides. Obviously, this is easier said than done. What is important and what is unimportant, what is helpful and what impedes your presentation is ultimately your decision. Trust your instincts and rely on your expertise.

There’s always an x factor!

Another reason why there is no patent solution for the perfect presentation is that there are so many variables that can affect a presentation. Factors such as topic, audience and location should always be taken into consideration when it comes to the scope and structure of slide presentations.

Things to keep in mind:

• The topic. The number of slides that are required and helpful in presentations depends greatly on the topic. For example, pictures or graphics are best suited if you want to explain technical processes, discuss building progress or new products, or present business figures and statistics. It makes little sense to cut down on relevant content just to keep the number of slides low. If your topic is a bit dry, visual material can help keep your audience interested. If your topic relies more on verbal explanations and your slides are there to provide some visual guidance, it wouldn’t make sense to add slides.
• The audience. Who your audience is plays a factor in how many slides you need. Here’s an example: You probably won’t need slides that explain and illustrate technical terms when presenting to an audience of experts in that field. But, if you’re communicating the same content to non-experts or an inexperienced audience, you will definitely need the visual material to clarify and simplify these same technical terms.

The room. The best presentation slide is not worth much if the audience can’t see it. Bad lighting an/or poor sight lines may prevent important content from being effectively communicated. This can be frustrating for both you and your audience. If you know the room isn’t well let or half your audience may not be able to see your presentation, think about investing less work in the slides and focusing more on the oral presentation. On the other hand, a room that offers excellent technical equipment can be a major asset, allowing you to add more audio-visual material, such as background music, to your presentation.

Trust your own expertise!

This point summarizes something fundamental; opinions are everywhere. Even something as seemingly innocuous as the optimal number of slides for a presentation is open for debate.  There’s a wealth of advice from experts on how many slides are right for presentations.

Don’t forget that none of these expert opinions were formed with your exact presentation style and topic in mind. And the recommendations often vary widely. While some recommend 40 slides in ten minutes, others recommend just two slides in ten minutes. In the end, you are the expert; you know how many slides you need.

This also applies to the time spent on each slide during the presentation. Not all slides are created equal – some need less time, some need more. It always depends on the structure and content of the slide. Don’t worry if you spend several minutes on one slide, but only seconds on another – that’s perfectly fine.

Expert opinions: helpful, but not mandatory

You can of course reference well-known presentation methods if you feel more confident using a given guideline. But make sure it fits and works with your presentation. Here are some well-known methods for slide presentations:

10/20/30 – The Kawasaki method:

Perhaps the best known and most commonly used method is the 10/20/30 rule by Guy Kawasaki. It specifies that ten slides be used in a 20-minute presentation. A font size of at least 30 should be used for text. This equals to about two minutes per slide – a standard rule for presentations. This method can be great for beginners or inexperienced speakers. However, it’s not an iron-clad rule and can be adapted to fit your needs.

The Pecha Kucha method:

The Pecha Kucha method is becoming more popular. The method comes from Japan and translates to “constantly talking”. Pecha Kucha is based on very rigid guidelines regarding time and the number of slides. A Pecha Kucha presentation contains 20 images. Each image is shown for exactly 20 seconds. The speaking time amounts to exactly 6 minutes and 40 seconds. The clear, simple rhythm seems to be what makes this method so successful. Here too, feel free to adapt the rigorous rules for yourself.

The Lessig method:

The Lessig method is basically a speed slideshow. This interesting presentation technique uses a large number of slides with a fast transition between slides. It allows 15 seconds (or even less) per slide, which is about four slides per minute. Due to the fast changes, the audience has little chance to drift off and is drawn into the presentation. Of course, the spoken part of the presentation needs to be perfectly synchronized with the slides. This requires practice and can make the method pretty challenging for the presenter, especially beginners.

 The Takahashi method:

The Takahashi method follows a similar principle as the Lessig method. Again, the slides only appear for a few seconds at a time. The special feature: all slides contain only one or a few words in a large font. They’re meant to underscore what the presenter is saying. Like the Lessing method, the audience’s attention is key. This method provides the presenter with key points which can make presentation tools, such as index cards unnecessary. Of course, this method is not recommended for presentations that require images, graphics or other similar visual material.

As you can see, there are many different approaches and ideas. Which method is the right one for you? The answer is up to you. It’s your presentation after all. If one of these methods and its defined guidelines works well for you, use it! Otherwise, pick and choose what you like from it and adapt it to your presentation.

Other useful PowerPoint tips:

• Your preparation should never start with your slide presentation – this should be one of the final steps. Many presenters take the opposite approach and design their presentation around their slides. This creates a false focus – the slides aren’t the focus, the presentation is. Prepare your content first and then decide how to present it in a meaningful way.
• When timing your presentation, remember to leave some room for questions, discussion or other delays. 80% of your time should be given to your actual presentation. If you take longer than planned and exceed your time, you’ll notice your audience quickly becoming restless and disinterested. If you finish a bit earlier, that’s ok. Never try to stretch the presentation unnecessarily by adding something or jumping back to a point in the presentation. Allow time to focus on your audience’s questions and comments.
• Expect the unexpected and be flexible. You may find that your audience is already pretty familiar with some of your content. If this happens, keep the presentation moving and focus more on other points. You may also need more time for questions or clarifications. This is normal during a presentation. Don’t let it throw you off balance.
• Take time to check whether all the technical equipment is working and familiarize yourself with the settings and operations. This is especially true if you work with embedded video or audio.
• Don’t give the slide presentation too much importance! Research shows that 90% of the impression a presenter makes depends on the way he or she speaks, particularly their voice and body language. It might be worthwhile to spend more preparation time on your delivery than on text and slides.
• Slide presentations are now so common in meetings that speakers feel obligated to use them. They really do offer wonderful possibilities and can be an asset to both the speaker and the audience. But this is not always the case. Not every topic needs audio-visual support via a slide presentation. And not every speech benefits from it either. Unless you’ve been explicitly told to use one, don’t feel you need to use a slide presentation if you don’t think it works for your topic.

A final word of advice:  

The biggest stumbling block in presentations is usually not the slide presentation itself, but the uncertainty of the presenter. Your listeners have probably given presentations themselves and are familiar with the challenges. They’ll most likely be forgiving of a few slides too many or too few. Stay poised and be yourself. A perfect but lifeless presentation often makes less of an impact than one with personality and a few rough edges.

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10 Tips to Make Your PowerPoint Presentation Effective

You may have heard of the famous 10/20/30 rule , devised by Guy Kawasaki , for designing presentations. This rule states that using 10 slides in 20 minutes at a 30 point minimum font size is the most effective presentation strategy—but what does this really mean?

The most important thing to remember, particularly if you’re using PowerPoint to convey your message, is to keep your audience in mind when preparing your presentation. Your audience wants a relevant presentation, not just something that is visually appealing .

A common mistake speakers make when designing PowerPoint presentations is being too passionate about it that they put everything they know into it. In trying to get their point across, presenters tend to use complex jargon and impart too much information, leaving the audience confused about the actual purpose of the presentation.

So how can you simplify your information but still convey a powerful message to your audience?

Here are 10 suggestions:

1) Cut out the wordiness

Ironic as it may seem, an essential part of proving a point is to use a minimal amount of words per slide so that the audience is focused on you, not on the screen. It’s rather difficult for any kind of audience to read texts and listen to you at the same time. If you have longer statements, break them down into multiple slides and highlight the key words. This doesn’t mean you limit your content to dull, boring facts. Feel free to incorporate anecdotes or quotes as long as they’re relevant and support your message.

2) Add pictures

Instead of more words, supplement your ideas with vivid imagery. Again, the key is not overusing photos to the point that it makes your presentations look unprofessional. Photos should only be used if they promote or emphasize the main idea of your slide.

3) Use appropriate animation

Like pictures, use animation only when appropriate and only if you’ve completely rehearsed your presentation with the animation flow. Otherwise, they will be distracting and will make it appear that you’ve designed your presentation in poor taste.

4) Don’t overuse numbers

As with words, minimize the amount of numbers you present in each slide. If you have charts that summarize the total figures toward the end, then you no longer need to fill up your entire chart with the little numbers on the scale.

5) Use large fonts

Aside from the obvious reason that larger fonts are more readable, size dictates the impact of your message and a larger one makes it easier for your audience to clearly grasp what you’re saying or want to highlight. Aside from font size, pay attention to the spacing between paragraphs, rows, and columns; you don’t want your text to appear jumbled.

6) Maintain consistency

The whole objective of your presentation is to drive home a point, not to make your presentation look cheesy. Keep your font sizes and the size and format of a box on one page consistent throughout your slides.

7) Limit bullet points

Keep your bullet points to a maximum of 5-6 per slide. In addition, the words per bullet point should also be limited to 5-6 words. It’s also wise to vary what you present in each slide, such as alternating between bullet points, graphics, and graph slides, in order to sustain the interest and focus of your audience.

8) Choose colors and contrast effectively .

Use bold colors and high contrast. A color may look completely different on your monitor than it will when projected on a large screen.

9) Tell a story

Everyone loves a good story , especially if it’s something that they can easily relate to. A good story begins with a problem and the more irritating the problem is for the audience, the more effective your presentation will be once you’ve provided a possible solution for them.

10) Be flexible

In order to develop a strong connection with your audience, you need to be flexible with your slides. During your speech, you may feel that some slides have become unnecessary; therefore you want to prepare your presentation in such a way that you can easily interchange or eliminate them. Conversely, prepare some optional slides in anticipation of questions or ideas you expect from your audience. This will give your presentation the “wow” factor.

When using PowerPoint to deliver a PowerFUL point, your goal isn’t to design the best presentation but the most effective one. This means creating a presentation that your audience can connect with through interest, participation, memory recall, and ideally, learning something useful.

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How many slides should I have in my PowerPoint presentation?

When you’re planning out your next big presentation, it can be hard to know what the slide count sweet spot is. How many slides to put in a presentation, to keep your audience’s attention, is a much bigger question than it may seem.

We’d love to tell you there’s a simple answer, but if you really want to create a persuasive argument, there are a few variables to consider when planning the number of slides in your presentation. And despite what other articles spout, it has nothing to do with time.

We bet you’ve heard a few conflicting theories on this subject, so we thought it was about time we weighed in. You might’ve heard  Guy Kawasaki ’s 10/20/30 rule. This rule states that the “perfect” presentation has ten slides, lasts for 20 minutes, and uses a 30pt font. Or you might’ve read that every minute you speak equates to one slide on display behind you. You might even have uncovered some more formulaic and intricate theories than those, where x = the perfect number of slides. To reach x, you simply divide the number of people in the audience by how many seconds you have to speak, times that by how many steps between your house and the venue, to the power of your height in centimetres. If you’ve already worked your way through a series of varying opinions, you might currently be crying out “just tell me how many damn slides I need!”

Just tell me how many damn slides I need! You

While a lot of these theories are rooted in intelligent thinking and, sometimes, even science, we can’t get on board. They’re just too damn limiting. The people behind the theories were probably trying to over-simplify this complicated question, just to give you an answer. But do you want any answer? Or do you want the right answer?

The right answer is: you’re thinking about presentations wrong.

Do you think Jack Kerouac, Graham Greene, or Dan Brown ever sat down to write with the sole intention of landing on 432 pages? No, they had stories to tell, and it didn’t matter how many pages they took to tell them.

What makes you so different from  Kerouac ?

How many slides until there’s purpose?

You’re writing a presentation with a purpose. There’s a change you want to make, and your task is to convey your message persuasively, to inspire everyone that hears it to want the same change. Your purpose is not to fill exactly 20 minutes with exactly ten slides. It takes as many slides as it takes.

No, we’re not just going to leave you with that. We’re not trying to lose friends, clients and beloved readers.

We understand that presentations do often have a time limit, and that limit is one we have to consider when writing. But that limit needs to influence the number of ideas you try to convey, not dictate how many slides go into your presentation to convey these ideas. Because that’s what we’re really talking about here: ideas. For a shorter presentation, you’re going to need to be cut-throat with your editing. To trim the excess, until all that’s left is the most impactful, delicious centre piece. 

That doesn’t mean, if you have the freedom of time, you should use it to reel off every idea you’ve ever had. But you can allow yourself the luxury to layer linked ideas that all point towards one conclusion. To build a nest of ideas. And to support those ideas with facts, figures, previous successes, as well as other people’s ideas.

Only once you’ve written your detailed narrative structure, or your full script , if that’s how you feel most comfortable, should you even start to think about PowerPoint slides.

Give your ideas room to breathe

Each of your ideas deserves its time to shine. A dramatic pause works to let an impactful sentence sink in, giving the audience a moment to consider the gravity of the spoken word. Uncluttered slides have the same effect. If you try to include too many ideas on one slide, none of them are going to be understood, or remembered. 

If you’re just starting out in the world of persuasive communications, a good rule to follow is:  one idea, one slide . This will allow each idea to have its moment, without competing with any of the other ideas. This will also mean, visually, you’ll have more opportunity to enhance your message. With more slide real estate to play with, you can create presentation designs that hammer your ideas home, rather than confuse the situation further.

The journey of an idea:

• introduce it
• let it sink in

and signal the introduction of the next idea with a brand-new slide.

This is a great guide, for those lacking confidence, to use as a starting point. It is not a rule.

What counts as an idea?

Now, this is a much more complicated question, and one that will change for every presentation. In our role as guides in this scenario, we want to give you a tangible answer to your query, not simply introduce more questions, and more confusion, into the mix. After all, if your presentation is tomorrow and your search was the result of extreme desperation and maybe a little too much wine, well, you’re probably not reading this anymore because you’ve already poured said wine over your laptop in frustration. But if you are still with us, you’re probably really keen to get an answer right about now.

Frustration and confusion are not our goals. We just respect you too much to lie to you. We trust that you’ve caught on to the general theme that there are many considerations that go into the slide count of any presentation that comes through the Hype Presentations studio doors. Now that we’ve addressed that, we can give you a template to help you along your way.

If you’ve read any of our other  storytelling blogs , you already know that every story – this includes your presentation – needs a beginning, middle and end . Let’s break down a very basic structure, and accompanying slide count, for these three key sections.

This is where you set the scene, pique the audience’s interest, give them a clue as to what’s in it for them, and establish common ground. It might look something like this:

• Title slide : give your audience something exciting to look at, as they’re waiting for the presentation to begin. One slide.
• Agenda: lay out the journey they’re about to go on, and why it will be worth their while. One slide.
• Current situation : describe the landscape as it currently stands, making sure everyone is on the same page before you set off. No man left behind. One slide.

This is where we get into the real juicy bit of storytelling. And it’s also where all hope you had of squeezing a definitive slide count out of us will come tumbling down. 

A persuasive argument needs to acknowledge your audience’s challenges, and propose a solution to each one of them. Your audience might have one challenge, they might have 50, which is where the ambiguity kicks back in. Each challenge needs its own slide, and each solution does too. 

If your audience does have 50 challenges, try to find common themes between them, so you can address them as a cohesive group, all under one idea umbrella. Human beings find patterns comforting, so they’ll appreciate the bundling, as well as the reduced slide count.

Appealing to emotion, by showing you have the answer to your audience’s problems, is just one part of landing a persuasive argument. You also need to apply to logic and establish credibility. Again, this could take one slide, or it could take nine, but here is some general guidance:

• Case studies: one case study per slide.
• How it works: if the technology, service, or process you’re proposing is simple, showing your audience how it works may only take one slide. However, if it’s complicated, you’ll need to break it into component parts and tell this story across multiple slides. Remember, it’s about clarity and comprehension. It takes as many slides as it takes for the information to be processed.
• About you: audiences don’t care that much about how you were formed, or where your CEO worked before he came to be with you. Edit your company information down to what actually matters to them, and what will establish credibility in their eyes. If you’ve won awards that prove your innovations are the best in your field, show them the accolades. If the technology partner you work with is exclusive to you, let them know. The most effective ‘About us’ sections are one or two slides at the most. Avoid the company timeline, at all costs.

To close, you’re going to want to sum your key points up in one slide. Just a gentle reminder of the immense benefits they will receive by working with you.

And finally, your end slide should be, as the name suggests, one slide with a powerful call to action. To find out more about how to leave a lasting impression on every audience you encounter,  take a look at this article .

Even if you’re still pulling your hair out, desperately grasping for a simple number, hopefully these guidelines have given you some food for thought.

And now we’re going to complicate the already-fuzzy rules we’ve put in place. 

At Hype Presentations, we never look at the number of slides.

Give a shit, that’s what we say. Slide count doesn’t mean a damn thing. Sometimes we spread one message across five slides, because that’s how you get the animation to work seamlessly. Complicated navigation often requires duplicating slides, so that you don’t confuse PowerPoint as to where action came from. In contrast, we can present really complicated messaging on just one slide by using animation builds to break up the story, instead of a series of slides. There are so many variables. All we’re trying to say is, stop worrying yourself about slide count. 

However, some things, to do with slide count, you should worry yourself about:

Bad advice  

This is a call back to some of those other articles you likely stumbled across in your search. If you’re basing your presentation on hitting exactly one minute per slide, you’ve already lost your audience and you’re not even stood in front of them.

If you’re basing your presentation on hitting exactly one minute per slide, you’ve already lost your audience and you’re not even stood in front of them.

Are all ideas created equal? No. Does your audience care about everything you have to say in equal measure? No. Even if you’ve taken the “so what?” test, and all your messages have passed and are providing value to them, they’re not going to appreciate you skipping over important parts of the solution because the clock is ticking. 

Take time to explain the ideas with the greatest impact, and appreciate your audience’s intelligence enough to assume they’ll understand what an award means, without you describing it for a minute, just because the rule says so.

Do you need slides at all? 

Pick your jaw up off the floor. Just because we create next-level presentations day in, day out, and we absolutely bloody love PowerPoint, doesn’t mean we’re going to lead you astray. Sometimes, you just don’t need the support that slides bring. 

Slides are not there to remind you, as presenter, what your key talking points are. If you’re one of the – terrifyingly few – people who practice adequately ahead of a big presentation, you won’t need your memory jogged anyway. 

Slides are not there to tell the whole story for you. The slideshow is not the presentation. The words coming out of your mouth are what the audience came to hear. You are the star of your own presentation.

Before you start closing your laptop down in celebration, let’s take a step back and talk about why you (probably) do need slides.

What are slides for, anyway?

When  designed  and animated correctly, slides enhance your spoken message so that it’s easier to understand, easier to remember, and more persuasive. You and your slides are a team. There are some things that a visual can just do better than you can. Take, for example, a chart. You could spend half an hour painting a word picture of a chart you saw once. Or you could whack an impactful piece of data vis up on the screen and move on.

So, back to the original question you never even asked:

When might you not need slides?

If you only have five minutes to influence that desired change in the minds, hearts, and actions of your audience, an emotional and well-told story, spoken directly from your heart, without the dilution of technology or the fumbling of a slide clicker, could be the best way to get your message across. No distractions, no gimmicks, just authenticity. 

In this instance, it wouldn’t matter how many slides are in your presentation, they’re never going to be more impactful than your honesty and vulnerability.

In this short amount of time, your audience is unlikely to suffer from information overload and forget any of your messages, so you don’t need the slides for their ability to enhance memory. They’re unlikely to lose the train of your narrative, so you don’t need the slides as visual guidance. And if your story is told right, speaking to their challenges, and wrapped up in a situation that’s personal to them, you won’t need the persuasive powers of PowerPoint either.

But, nine times out of ten, a PowerPoint can only better your spoken messaging. Fact.

Nine times out of ten, a PowerPoint can only better your spoken messaging.

Extra time means extra slides 

And not just because of the extra ideas. If you’ve been asked to speak for a long time, firstly ask yourself if it’s really necessary. Can your audience concentrate for that long? Could the session be split into smaller chunks? Is it even going to be valuable for them? Do you have that many relevant ideas?

If it turns out to be necessary, there are some extra slides you’re going to want to add to your deck. Consider adding regular breaks (one slide per break), recaps (one slide per recap), even quizzes (one slide per question-answer combo) to keep your audience engaged, check understanding, and give them a chance to stretch their legs.

And, with the freedom of time, comes the opportunity to use other people’s voices to enhance your own. Consider adding relevant quotes, audio clips, or videos from recognisable people who support your message. Of course, you could animate these elements onto your slide with a click, but if you’re not that confident using PowerPoint, creating a new slide for each is an easier option.

When we’re deciding what the most impactful way to tell a client’s story is, we bring brilliant minds from each department together to throw ideas around, consider workarounds for each limitation, and push ourselves to deliver the best solution for each client. And not once do we say “But is that the right number of slides?”

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Home Blog PowerPoint Tutorials How To Set Time Duration To Switch Slides in PowerPoint

How To Set Time Duration To Switch Slides in PowerPoint

Usually, presenters use mouse clicks, keys from a keyboard or a remote to switch slides in PowerPoint . However, if you have your presentation well-timed or have to account for every second in a presentation due to time constraints, you might want to make sure that your slides are well-timed. To do this, you can add a time duration to switch your slides. In this tutorial we will show you how to set time duration to switch slides in PowerPoint. For the purpose of this post, we will be using the Financial PowerPoint Template .

Select Your Slides from Slides Pane

In the first step, click the slide preview for the slide you wish to set time for. In case you want all your slides to switch according to a set time limit (e.g. 10 seconds), select one slide and hit CTRL+A to select all slides.

In case you want to set a different time for each slide, you will have to select each slide one by one and follow the steps shown below.

Select a Time Duration for Your Slides from the Transitions Tab

From the Transitions tab, go to ‘After’ and add a time duration after which you wish to switch your slide(s). Also make sure that ‘ On Mouse Click’ is unchecked.

The process for switching slides is similar in various versions across PowerPoint and while we are demonstrating this method using PowerPoint 2013, you will find similar options in older versions (e.g. PowerPoint 2010).

For a Single slide: For a single slide, select the respective slide from the Preview pane and add a time duration for switching the slide.

For Multiple Slides: To apply the same time duration to multiple slides, select the slides from the Preview pane using CTRL+Mouse Click, go to the Transitions tab and set a time to switch them. As mentioned earlier, you can also select all slides by clicking a single slide preview, followed by CTRL+A.

In case you have applied slide transitions, you can also set the length of the transitions using the ‘Duration’ option from the same section.

Once you have followed the aforementioned steps, switch to Slide Show mode and your slides will switch according to the set time duration.

While having well-timed slides might help in good time management, you nevertheless need good presentation slides to make an impression on your audience. Slide Model provides High-Quality PowerPoint Templates with editable slide elements which have been designed by expert professionals to give you the imagery that can be attention grabbing and visually appealing. For more details, see our plans and pricing.

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PowerPoint 2013, PowerPoint Tips, Presentation, Presentation Tips, Time, Time Management, View Presentation Filed under PowerPoint Tutorials

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Ten simple rules for effective presentation slides

Kristen m. naegle.

Biomedical Engineering and the Center for Public Health Genomics, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, United States of America

Introduction

The “presentation slide” is the building block of all academic presentations, whether they are journal clubs, thesis committee meetings, short conference talks, or hour-long seminars. A slide is a single page projected on a screen, usually built on the premise of a title, body, and figures or tables and includes both what is shown and what is spoken about that slide. Multiple slides are strung together to tell the larger story of the presentation. While there have been excellent 10 simple rules on giving entire presentations [ 1 , 2 ], there was an absence in the fine details of how to design a slide for optimal effect—such as the design elements that allow slides to convey meaningful information, to keep the audience engaged and informed, and to deliver the information intended and in the time frame allowed. As all research presentations seek to teach, effective slide design borrows from the same principles as effective teaching, including the consideration of cognitive processing your audience is relying on to organize, process, and retain information. This is written for anyone who needs to prepare slides from any length scale and for most purposes of conveying research to broad audiences. The rules are broken into 3 primary areas. Rules 1 to 5 are about optimizing the scope of each slide. Rules 6 to 8 are about principles around designing elements of the slide. Rules 9 to 10 are about preparing for your presentation, with the slides as the central focus of that preparation.

Rule 1: Include only one idea per slide

Each slide should have one central objective to deliver—the main idea or question [ 3 – 5 ]. Often, this means breaking complex ideas down into manageable pieces (see Fig 1 , where “background” information has been split into 2 key concepts). In another example, if you are presenting a complex computational approach in a large flow diagram, introduce it in smaller units, building it up until you finish with the entire diagram. The progressive buildup of complex information means that audiences are prepared to understand the whole picture, once you have dedicated time to each of the parts. You can accomplish the buildup of components in several ways—for example, using presentation software to cover/uncover information. Personally, I choose to create separate slides for each piece of information content I introduce—where the final slide has the entire diagram, and I use cropping or a cover on duplicated slides that come before to hide what I’m not yet ready to include. I use this method in order to ensure that each slide in my deck truly presents one specific idea (the new content) and the amount of the new information on that slide can be described in 1 minute (Rule 2), but it comes with the trade-off—a change to the format of one of the slides in the series often means changes to all slides.

Top left: A background slide that describes the background material on a project from my lab. The slide was created using a PowerPoint Design Template, which had to be modified to increase default text sizes for this figure (i.e., the default text sizes are even worse than shown here). Bottom row: The 2 new slides that break up the content into 2 explicit ideas about the background, using a central graphic. In the first slide, the graphic is an explicit example of the SH2 domain of PI3-kinase interacting with a phosphorylation site (Y754) on the PDGFR to describe the important details of what an SH2 domain and phosphotyrosine ligand are and how they interact. I use that same graphic in the second slide to generalize all binding events and include redundant text to drive home the central message (a lot of possible interactions might occur in the human proteome, more than we can currently measure). Top right highlights which rules were used to move from the original slide to the new slide. Specific changes as highlighted by Rule 7 include increasing contrast by changing the background color, increasing font size, changing to sans serif fonts, and removing all capital text and underlining (using bold to draw attention). PDGFR, platelet-derived growth factor receptor.

Rule 2: Spend only 1 minute per slide

When you present your slide in the talk, it should take 1 minute or less to discuss. This rule is really helpful for planning purposes—a 20-minute presentation should have somewhere around 20 slides. Also, frequently giving your audience new information to feast on helps keep them engaged. During practice, if you find yourself spending more than a minute on a slide, there’s too much for that one slide—it’s time to break up the content into multiple slides or even remove information that is not wholly central to the story you are trying to tell. Reduce, reduce, reduce, until you get to a single message, clearly described, which takes less than 1 minute to present.

Rule 3: Make use of your heading

When each slide conveys only one message, use the heading of that slide to write exactly the message you are trying to deliver. Instead of titling the slide “Results,” try “CTNND1 is central to metastasis” or “False-positive rates are highly sample specific.” Use this landmark signpost to ensure that all the content on that slide is related exactly to the heading and only the heading. Think of the slide heading as the introductory or concluding sentence of a paragraph and the slide content the rest of the paragraph that supports the main point of the paragraph. An audience member should be able to follow along with you in the “paragraph” and come to the same conclusion sentence as your header at the end of the slide.

Rule 4: Include only essential points

While you are speaking, audience members’ eyes and minds will be wandering over your slide. If you have a comment, detail, or figure on a slide, have a plan to explicitly identify and talk about it. If you don’t think it’s important enough to spend time on, then don’t have it on your slide. This is especially important when faculty are present. I often tell students that thesis committee members are like cats: If you put a shiny bauble in front of them, they’ll go after it. Be sure to only put the shiny baubles on slides that you want them to focus on. Putting together a thesis meeting for only faculty is really an exercise in herding cats (if you have cats, you know this is no easy feat). Clear and concise slide design will go a long way in helping you corral those easily distracted faculty members.

Rule 5: Give credit, where credit is due

An exception to Rule 4 is to include proper citations or references to work on your slide. When adding citations, names of other researchers, or other types of credit, use a consistent style and method for adding this information to your slides. Your audience will then be able to easily partition this information from the other content. A common mistake people make is to think “I’ll add that reference later,” but I highly recommend you put the proper reference on the slide at the time you make it, before you forget where it came from. Finally, in certain kinds of presentations, credits can make it clear who did the work. For the faculty members heading labs, it is an effective way to connect your audience with the personnel in the lab who did the work, which is a great career booster for that person. For graduate students, it is an effective way to delineate your contribution to the work, especially in meetings where the goal is to establish your credentials for meeting the rigors of a PhD checkpoint.

Rule 6: Use graphics effectively

As a rule, you should almost never have slides that only contain text. Build your slides around good visualizations. It is a visual presentation after all, and as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. However, on the flip side, don’t muddy the point of the slide by putting too many complex graphics on a single slide. A multipanel figure that you might include in a manuscript should often be broken into 1 panel per slide (see Rule 1 ). One way to ensure that you use the graphics effectively is to make a point to introduce the figure and its elements to the audience verbally, especially for data figures. For example, you might say the following: “This graph here shows the measured false-positive rate for an experiment and each point is a replicate of the experiment, the graph demonstrates …” If you have put too much on one slide to present in 1 minute (see Rule 2 ), then the complexity or number of the visualizations is too much for just one slide.

Rule 7: Design to avoid cognitive overload

The type of slide elements, the number of them, and how you present them all impact the ability for the audience to intake, organize, and remember the content. For example, a frequent mistake in slide design is to include full sentences, but reading and verbal processing use the same cognitive channels—therefore, an audience member can either read the slide, listen to you, or do some part of both (each poorly), as a result of cognitive overload [ 4 ]. The visual channel is separate, allowing images/videos to be processed with auditory information without cognitive overload [ 6 ] (Rule 6). As presentations are an exercise in listening, and not reading, do what you can to optimize the ability of the audience to listen. Use words sparingly as “guide posts” to you and the audience about major points of the slide. In fact, you can add short text fragments, redundant with the verbal component of the presentation, which has been shown to improve retention [ 7 ] (see Fig 1 for an example of redundant text that avoids cognitive overload). Be careful in the selection of a slide template to minimize accidentally adding elements that the audience must process, but are unimportant. David JP Phillips argues (and effectively demonstrates in his TEDx talk [ 5 ]) that the human brain can easily interpret 6 elements and more than that requires a 500% increase in human cognition load—so keep the total number of elements on the slide to 6 or less. Finally, in addition to the use of short text, white space, and the effective use of graphics/images, you can improve ease of cognitive processing further by considering color choices and font type and size. Here are a few suggestions for improving the experience for your audience, highlighting the importance of these elements for some specific groups:

• Use high contrast colors and simple backgrounds with low to no color—for persons with dyslexia or visual impairment.
• Use sans serif fonts and large font sizes (including figure legends), avoid italics, underlining (use bold font instead for emphasis), and all capital letters—for persons with dyslexia or visual impairment [ 8 ].
• Use color combinations and palettes that can be understood by those with different forms of color blindness [ 9 ]. There are excellent tools available to identify colors to use and ways to simulate your presentation or figures as they might be seen by a person with color blindness (easily found by a web search).
• In this increasing world of virtual presentation tools, consider practicing your talk with a closed captioning system capture your words. Use this to identify how to improve your speaking pace, volume, and annunciation to improve understanding by all members of your audience, but especially those with a hearing impairment.

Rule 8: Design the slide so that a distracted person gets the main takeaway

It is very difficult to stay focused on a presentation, especially if it is long or if it is part of a longer series of talks at a conference. Audience members may get distracted by an important email, or they may start dreaming of lunch. So, it’s important to look at your slide and ask “If they heard nothing I said, will they understand the key concept of this slide?” The other rules are set up to help with this, including clarity of the single point of the slide (Rule 1), titling it with a major conclusion (Rule 3), and the use of figures (Rule 6) and short text redundant to your verbal description (Rule 7). However, with each slide, step back and ask whether its main conclusion is conveyed, even if someone didn’t hear your accompanying dialog. Importantly, ask if the information on the slide is at the right level of abstraction. For example, do you have too many details about the experiment, which hides the conclusion of the experiment (i.e., breaking Rule 1)? If you are worried about not having enough details, keep a slide at the end of your slide deck (after your conclusions and acknowledgments) with the more detailed information that you can refer to during a question and answer period.

Rule 9: Iteratively improve slide design through practice

Well-designed slides that follow the first 8 rules are intended to help you deliver the message you intend and in the amount of time you intend to deliver it in. The best way to ensure that you nailed slide design for your presentation is to practice, typically a lot. The most important aspects of practicing a new presentation, with an eye toward slide design, are the following 2 key points: (1) practice to ensure that you hit, each time through, the most important points (for example, the text guide posts you left yourself and the title of the slide); and (2) practice to ensure that as you conclude the end of one slide, it leads directly to the next slide. Slide transitions, what you say as you end one slide and begin the next, are important to keeping the flow of the “story.” Practice is when I discover that the order of my presentation is poor or that I left myself too few guideposts to remember what was coming next. Additionally, during practice, the most frequent things I have to improve relate to Rule 2 (the slide takes too long to present, usually because I broke Rule 1, and I’m delivering too much information for one slide), Rule 4 (I have a nonessential detail on the slide), and Rule 5 (I forgot to give a key reference). The very best type of practice is in front of an audience (for example, your lab or peers), where, with fresh perspectives, they can help you identify places for improving slide content, design, and connections across the entirety of your talk.

Rule 10: Design to mitigate the impact of technical disasters

The real presentation almost never goes as we planned in our heads or during our practice. Maybe the speaker before you went over time and now you need to adjust. Maybe the computer the organizer is having you use won’t show your video. Maybe your internet is poor on the day you are giving a virtual presentation at a conference. Technical problems are routinely part of the practice of sharing your work through presentations. Hence, you can design your slides to limit the impact certain kinds of technical disasters create and also prepare alternate approaches. Here are just a few examples of the preparation you can do that will take you a long way toward avoiding a complete fiasco:

• Save your presentation as a PDF—if the version of Keynote or PowerPoint on a host computer cause issues, you still have a functional copy that has a higher guarantee of compatibility.
• In using videos, create a backup slide with screen shots of key results. For example, if I have a video of cell migration, I’ll be sure to have a copy of the start and end of the video, in case the video doesn’t play. Even if the video worked, you can pause on this backup slide and take the time to highlight the key results in words if someone could not see or understand the video.
• Avoid animations, such as figures or text that flash/fly-in/etc. Surveys suggest that no one likes movement in presentations [ 3 , 4 ]. There is likely a cognitive underpinning to the almost universal distaste of pointless animations that relates to the idea proposed by Kosslyn and colleagues that animations are salient perceptual units that captures direct attention [ 4 ]. Although perceptual salience can be used to draw attention to and improve retention of specific points, if you use this approach for unnecessary/unimportant things (like animation of your bullet point text, fly-ins of figures, etc.), then you will distract your audience from the important content. Finally, animations cause additional processing burdens for people with visual impairments [ 10 ] and create opportunities for technical disasters if the software on the host system is not compatible with your planned animation.

Conclusions

These rules are just a start in creating more engaging presentations that increase audience retention of your material. However, there are wonderful resources on continuing on the journey of becoming an amazing public speaker, which includes understanding the psychology and neuroscience behind human perception and learning. For example, as highlighted in Rule 7, David JP Phillips has a wonderful TEDx talk on the subject [ 5 ], and “PowerPoint presentation flaws and failures: A psychological analysis,” by Kosslyn and colleagues is deeply detailed about a number of aspects of human cognition and presentation style [ 4 ]. There are many books on the topic, including the popular “Presentation Zen” by Garr Reynolds [ 11 ]. Finally, although briefly touched on here, the visualization of data is an entire topic of its own that is worth perfecting for both written and oral presentations of work, with fantastic resources like Edward Tufte’s “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information” [ 12 ] or the article “Visualization of Biomedical Data” by O’Donoghue and colleagues [ 13 ].

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the countless presenters, colleagues, students, and mentors from which I have learned a great deal from on effective presentations. Also, a thank you to the wonderful resources published by organizations on how to increase inclusivity. A special thanks to Dr. Jason Papin and Dr. Michael Guertin on early feedback of this editorial.

Funding Statement

The author received no specific funding for this work.

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PowerPoint Tips  - Simple Rules for Better PowerPoint Presentations

Powerpoint tips  -, simple rules for better powerpoint presentations, powerpoint tips simple rules for better powerpoint presentations.

PowerPoint Tips: Simple Rules for Better PowerPoint Presentations

Lesson 17: simple rules for better powerpoint presentations.

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Simple rules for better PowerPoint presentations

Have you ever given a PowerPoint presentation and noticed that something about it just seemed a little … off? If you’re unfamiliar with basic PowerPoint design principles, it can be difficult to create a slide show that presents your information in the best light.

Poorly designed presentations can leave an audience feeling confused, bored, and even irritated. Review these tips to make your next presentation more engaging.

Don't read your presentation straight from the slides

If your audience can both read and hear, it’s a waste of time for you to simply read your slides aloud. Your audience will zone out and stop listening to what you’re saying, which means they won’t hear any extra information you include.

Instead of typing out your entire presentation, include only main ideas, keywords, and talking points in your slide show text. Engage your audience by sharing the details out loud.

Follow the 5/5/5 rule

To keep your audience from feeling overwhelmed, you should keep the text on each slide short and to the point. Some experts suggest using the 5/5/5 rule : no more than five words per line of text, five lines of text per slide, or five text-heavy slides in a row.

Don't forget your audience

Who will be watching your presentation? The same goofy effects and funny clip art that would entertain a classroom full of middle-school students might make you look unprofessional in front of business colleagues and clients.

Humor can lighten up a presentation, but if you use it inappropriately your audience might think you don’t know what you’re doing. Know your audience, and tailor your presentation to their tastes and expectations.

Choose readable colors and fonts

Your text should be easy to read and pleasant to look at. Large, simple fonts and theme colors are always your best bet. The best fonts and colors can vary depending on your presentation setting. Presenting in a large room? Make your text larger than usual so people in the back can read it. Presenting with the lights on? Dark text on a light background is your best bet for visibility.

Don't overload your presentation with animations

As anyone who’s sat through a presentation while every letter of every paragraph zoomed across the screen can tell you, being inundated with complicated animations and exciting slide transitions can become irritating.

Before including effects like this in your presentation, ask yourself: Would this moment in the presentation be equally strong without an added effect? Does it unnecessarily delay information? If the answer to either question is yes—or even maybe—leave out the effect.

Use animations sparingly to enhance your presentation

Don’t take the last tip to mean you should avoid animations and other effects entirely. When used sparingly, subtle effects and animations can add to your presentation. For example, having bullet points appear as you address them rather than before can help keep your audience’s attention.

Keep these tips in mind the next time you create a presentation—your audience will thank you. For more detailed information on creating a PowerPoint presentation, visit our Office tutorials .

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.css-1qrtm5m{display:block;margin-bottom:8px;text-transform:uppercase;font-size:14px;line-height:1.5714285714285714;-webkit-letter-spacing:-0.35px;-moz-letter-spacing:-0.35px;-ms-letter-spacing:-0.35px;letter-spacing:-0.35px;font-weight:300;color:#606F7B;}@media (min-width:600px){.css-1qrtm5m{font-size:16px;line-height:1.625;-webkit-letter-spacing:-0.5px;-moz-letter-spacing:-0.5px;-ms-letter-spacing:-0.5px;letter-spacing:-0.5px;}} Best Practices The #1 rule for improving your presentation slides

by Tom Rielly • May 12, 2020

When giving presentations, either on a video conference call or in person, your slides, videos and graphics (or lack of them) can be an important element in helping you tell your story or express your idea. This is the first of a series of blog posts that will give you tips and tricks on how to perfect your visual presentations.

Your job as a presenter is to build your idea -- step-by-step -- in the minds of your audience members. One tool to do that is presentation graphics, such as slides and videos.

Why graphics for your presentation?

A common mistake is using slides or videos as a crutch, even if they don’t actually add anything to your presentation. Not all presentations need graphics. Lots of presentations work wonderfully with just one person standing on a stage telling a story, as demonstrated by many TED Talks.

You should only use slides if they serve a purpose: conveying scientific information, art, and things that are hard to explain without pictures. Once you have decided on using slides, you will have a number of decisions to make. We’ll help you with the basics of making a presentation that is, above all, clear and easy to understand. The most important thing to remember here is: less is more.

Less is so much more

You want to aim for the fewest number of slides, the fewest number of photos, the fewest words per slide, the least cluttered slides and the most white space on your slides. This is the most violated slide rule, but it is the secret to success. Take a look at these examples.

As you can see in the above example, you don’t need fancy backgrounds or extra words to convey a simple concept. If you take “Everything you need to know about Turtles”, and delete “everything you need to know about” leaving just “turtles”, the slide has become much easier for your audience to read, and tells the story with economy.

The above example demonstrates that a single image that fills the entire screen is far more powerful than a slide cluttered with images. A slide with too many images may be detrimental to your presentation. The audience will spend more mental energy trying to sort through the clutter than listening to your presentation. If you need multiple images, then put each one on its own slide. Make each image high-resolution and have it fill the entire screen. If the photos are not the same dimensions as the screen, put them on a black background. Don’t use other colors, especially white.

Your slides will be much more effective if you use the fewest words, characters, and pictures needed to tell your story. Long paragraphs make the audience strain to read them, which means they are not paying attention to you. Your audience may even get stressed if you move on to your next slide before they’ve finished reading your paragraph. The best way to make sure the attention stays on you is to limit word count to no more than 10 words per slide. As presentation expert Nancy Duarte says “any slide with more than 10 words is a document.” If you really do need a longer explanation of something, handouts or follow-up emails are the way to go.

Following a “less is more” approach is one of the simplest things you can do to improve your presentation visuals and the impact of your presentation overall. Make sure your visuals add to your presentation rather than distract from it and get your message across.

Ready to learn more about how to make your presentation even better? Get TED Masterclass and develop your ideas into TED-style talks.

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• Presentations

30 PowerPoint Presentation Tips to Make Good PPT Slides in 2024 (+ 6 Expert Tips)

• Bahasa Indonesia

Here are 30 quick PowerPoint presentation tips to help you improve your presentations. 

Plus, get PowerPoint tips on changing your slide design to make your content shine. We've even called on six presentation experts for their best tips.

How to Make a Good PowerPoint Presentation (Watch & Learn)

This screencast is a speed round of my very favorite PowerPoint tricks. It's a great resource to learn how to make a presentable PowerPoint. I'll walk you through ten of my favorite PowerPoint tips and tricks to create a better presentation.

Keep reading for an illustrated version of these good PPT tips (and more) that you can use to improve your PowerPoint presentations. You'll see 30 of our favorite PowerPoint presentation tips and tricks, including techniques to update slide master PowerPoint 2024 designs.

Jump to content in this section:

• How Do You Give a Memorable PPT Presentation?
• Practice Makes Perfect
• Adapt Your Presentation to the Audience
• Use a Custom Font
• Use Contrast
• Avoid Too Many Animations
• Use the Rule of Three
• Use a Custom PPT Theme Design
• Make Use of Charts and Graphs
• Use the Built-in Slide Layouts
• Align Text Consistently
• Make Your Exports User-Friendly
• Try a Different Color Scheme
• Edit Slide Masters for Consistency
• Use the Alignment Feature
• Use Stock Assets
• Reduce Your Content
• Rethink Your Slide Order
• Use PowerPoint Animations
• Invite Collaborators
• Add Supporting Video Clips
• Use Infographic Templates
• Use Impactful Closing Techniques
• Include Data in the Appendix
• Alternate Between Solid Color and White Slides
• Present Information With Maps
• Keep the Design Best Practices in Mind
• Set a Time Limit
• Test Your Content Everywhere

30 Tips: How to Make Good PowerPoint Presentation Designs Fast in 2024

A few tried and true tips can help you speed up your PowerPoint presentation design. Check out 30 of my favorite PowerPoint tips to do just that. Each of these give you PowerPoint slideshow help to create good PowerPoint slides:

1. How Do You Give a Memorable PPT Presentation?

If you're learning the top PowerPoint presentation tips and tricks, you're probably asking yourself: how do I give a presentation that won't be forgotten?

We all want to be remembered. The best PowerPoint slideshow help to make a mark on the audience. There are tried-and-true ways to do just that, and expert Neil Tomlinson shares expertise on being remembered:

Get your main point into the presentation as early as possible (this avoids any risk of audience fatigue or attention span waning), then substantiate your point with facts, figures etc and then reiterate your point at the end in a ‘Summary’.

2. Practice Makes Perfect

Also, don’t forget to practice your presentation. Go through your slide deck a few times to make sure you know it like the back of your hand when the big day arrives. Doing so helps you feel more confident. It'll reduce any anxiety and nervousness you might feel as the presentation day approaches.

What's the best way to rehears for a good PowerPoint? Here's one of the top PowerPoint presentation tips from expert presenter Sandra Zimmer :

Once slides are ready, practice one slide at a time aloud until you feel like you know it and like the flow of speech. Be willing to change anything that does not feel in flow. At the end of learning all your slides, practice the whole talk.

If you want even more great PowerPoint presentation tips and tricks, check out the following post:

3. Adapt Your Presentation to the Audience

Let's say that you're a seasoned presenter with a pretty standard set of presentation topics. Maybe you're an expert in your field, and you're asked to give a PPT presentation frequently on similar topics.

That's the value of being an expert. You might have a standard spiel that you give your audiences, and your content won't totally change from one presentation to another. That's why it helps to make only slight tweaks to adapt your presentation to each audience.

Leading presentation expert Suzannah Baum offered up this advice:

Different audiences will have different needs and different challenges, which requires me to re-sequence the slides, or create new ones. I tend to do a lot of research on my audiences – via surveys, interviews, and conversations with the hiring manager – to help me better understand what information would be most relevant to them.

How do you adapt to your audience? Here are a few more tips:

• Learn about them. If you're asked to speak, talk to the curator of the presentation to learn more about the audience and their background.
• Ask about them! With contact details, send out a survey or a response link to ask for feedback and preparation info. Ask leading questions like "what do you want to learn?"
• Consider the environment.  If you're presenting via Zoom, your style will differ from presenting in person. The key is to acknowledge the difference and adapt to your environment.

Learn everything you can about your audience. Learning how to make a presentable PowerPoint is all about thinking of the recipient, not the presenter!

4. Use a Custom Font

A PowerPoint presentation tip that'll make your slideshow more interesting and more engaging is to use a custom font.

Fonts set the tone for your presentation. So, when you use a premium font, you’re opting for a high-quality font while also adding a personal or creative touch. 

When choosing a font, remember that you want everyone to read your text easily. 

5. Use Contrast

One PowerPoint trick is to use contrast to make some of your text stand out or make it easier to read.

If you’re putting text over an image on our PowerPoint slide, you may need to use a white box with black text in it to make your text easier to read. You can also use contrasting colors to highlight important text.

6. Avoid Too Many Animations

Another PowerPoint tip is to avoid having too many animations or transitions.

When you've got too many animations, it can be distracting to the audience. It’s not only distracting, but it's unprofessional.

It’s best to stick to one or two animations throughout your presentation. Also, if you've got any animations in your presentation, make sure to test them to see if they work before presenting.

7. Add Audio

Include audio on a slide on PowerPoint to increase audience engagement. Audio can be anything from fun sound effects to interview clips. You can even add an audio clip of your voice.

Audio gives you a break from speaking while also engaging the audience. Envato Elements has hundreds of premium audio clips if you want to add some.

8. Use the Rule of Three

One PowerPoint tip and trick is to follow the rules of PowerPoint.

One of those rules is the rule of three. It's where you start by dividing your presentation into thirds. Everything should come in thirds, so if you use bullet points, you should only have three. If you use icons, you should only have three.

When things come in threes, it's easier to remember them. For more information, read this informative article:

9. Use a Custom PPT Theme Design

Above all, consistently use custom PowerPoint themes. Microsoft has built-in themes that you can use for free, sure. But the premium themes that are on Envato Elements   are a major step-up from PowerPoint's built-in themes. 

When you subscribe to Envato Elements, you'll have access to unlimited downloads of all the PowerPoint themes. Right now, Envato Elements has almost 4,000 PowerPoint themes and that number is always growing. You'll learn tips for a good PowerPoint presentation by using the best templates.

10. Make Use of Charts and Graphs

Illustrate your data with the use of charts and graphs. Not only will you be able to make your presentation more visually appealing, but you'll also help your audience remember the information better.

Many PowerPoint templates already include chart and graph elements. Easily customize them to make your data and stats more interesting and easier to understand.

Want to learn more about how to use data? Turn to expert Adrienne J ohnston , a presentation professional:

When it comes to visualizing data in presentations, we have to remember that our audience does not need all the fine details of the data - they need the main takeaway and we need to make sure that's evident to them when looking at the slide.

11. Use the Built-in Slide Layouts

Inside of PowerPoint themes, you'll find layouts , which are custom slide designs.

Most themes include a selection of content layouts that you can use as a starting point for your own slide designs. You can leverage slide master PowerPoint 2024 designs with the help of layouts.

Layouts are like a starting point for your PowerPoint presentation slides. They contain combinations of placeholders for text boxes, images, and more.

Instead of clicking and drawing individual objects onto the slide, use one of these layouts to start your slide off. It's one of the top PowerPoint presentation tips and tricks to save time.

12. Align Text Consistently

When you're working with text on your slide, it helps to ensure that it aligns consistently. Keeping your text aligned in the same orientation really makes a slide look clean. 

In the example below, I've basically got three text boxes:

• list of bulleted points

Notice that all this text is aligned left. 

Aligning text was the " aha " moment that I learned when I started studying slide design. It's one of those steps that makes a slide look much neater and professional, so keep it in mind when designing.

13. Make Your Exports User-Friendly

No matter how great your PowerPoint presentation slides look, you need to think about how your user will use the presentation file. 

Any of these are likely scenarios if you're regularly sending presentations to other users:

• The viewer may not have PowerPoint installed on their computer.
• The recipient may be using a version of PowerPoint that renders the presentation differently.
• Maybe you don't want the user to be able to make any edits or see your notes in the presentation file.

In this case, my favorite tip is to export the presentation as a PDF. To do that, go to File > Export > Create PDF , and then save your presentation as a PDF.

This is sure to help most of your users see the presentation just the way you intended.

14. Try a Different Color Scheme

Many PowerPoint themes have more than one color scheme that you can apply to your presentation. On the Design  tab, click on the drop-down next to Themes to try out a different color scheme.

Typically, these will restyle your entire presentation. Premium themes that you might get from Envato Elements, for example, may have many versions inside the original presentation zip file.

15. Edit Slide Masters for Consistency

The slide master controls the design for your PowerPoint slide. Instead of making the same change to each slide, apply a change to a slide master. It'll affect all the PowerPoint presentation slides that use the same master.

It's ideal to apply a logo to the slide master itself, for example. This keeps the logo the same size and in the same position on each slide.

To do that, go to View > Slide Master.  On the right side, you're likely to see a variety of slide masters that control designs for many slides. Drop the elements that you want to remain consistent onto one of the slide masters.

16. Use the Alignment Feature

PowerPoint presentation slides look better when the objects on them are in line with one another. There's a certain visual rhythm that occurs when objects line up in the center or along certain boundary lines.

When you start dragging objects on your slide, you'll see guiding lines that pop up. These are very intuitive, and you'll likely notice that they help you line up your objects. You might seem them pop up when you've got a box that's equidistant between two other objects on the slide, for example.

This is one of the best tricks for improving the look of your PowerPoint slide. Spend some time making sure that your key elements line up cohesively.

17. Use Stock Assets

Earlier, I mentioned using Envato Elements to grab PowerPoint themes. But there's more that comes with an Envato Elements subscription for presentations.

That includes a wide variety of stock photos, graphics,  and custom designed fonts  that you can use in your presentation. Instead of reusing the same stock photo or clip art, Envato Elements has everything you need to supplement a presentation. 

Again, Envato Elements is the perfect subscription if you build presentations. It's a one-stop-shop that you can use to fill content.

18. Reduce Your Content

There's nothing that makes an audience tune out faster than being overloaded with slide content. Sometimes we try to make so many points that the audience misses all of them due to information overload.

Less is truly more. When you cut the weaker points of your presentation, the audience's attention will follow your key points accordingly.

It seems like cheating, but one of the best steps that you can take for your slide is to simply reduce the number of items that are on it. Convert some of your typed points to things you'll speak verbally.

19. Rethink Your Slide Order

Sometimes, I find that my presentations are out of order. I might spend too much time explaining my decision before I get to the conclusion.

In these cases, I like to use Slide Sorter View  to re-sequence the slides in my presentation. To access this view, go to View > Slide Sorter  on PowerPoint's ribbon.

From Slide Sorter view, you've got a top-down view of all the slides in your presentation deck. It sometimes becomes obvious that the slides can be reordered into a better sequence from this view.

20. Use PowerPoint Animations 

One of my favorite PowerPoint presentation tips is to complement your major points with a bit of animation. Using animation can bring a key point onto your slide with style!

Check out ten of the best PowerPoint tips for how to use animation from expert Sven Lenaerts below:

21. Invite Collaborators

Building a presentation often benefits from a second set of eyes. That's why it helps so much to invite a collaborator to work with you side-by-side in Microsoft PowerPoint.

Pushing your presentation up to OneDrive and inviting collaborators is easy. Thanks to the cloud-based approach, more than one user can edit a slide deck in real time. Learn how to do that in the tutorial below:

22. Add Supporting Video Clips

Building impactful presentations is all about adding other perspectives and angles to the content. One of my favorite ways to do that is to add a video clip. Maybe that's a production that you built on your own or found on sites like YouTube.

Either way, learn how to add and auto play a video clip in the quick tip below:

23. Use Infographic Templates

More presentations than ever will feature visuals that tell stories with data. But it's easy for an audience become overwhelmed with data. 

That's where infographics come into play. Learn to use them in PowerPoint in the tutorial below:

24. Use Impactful Closing Techniques

I've sat through many presentations in my life. I can only remember a few that really stick out, thanks to techniques that highlighted key points. You need PowerPoint tips and tricks that help leave your audience with an impact.

To do just that, make sure you use some of the techniques highlighted in the article below:

To do that, just drag and drop the thumbnails into the order you want. When you return to Normal view, the PowerPoint presentation slides will be in the resequenced order you set here.

25. Include Data in the Appendix

Many PowerPoint presentations include data in the form of charts and graphs. That means that you'll condense specifics into a few easy-to-follow charts.

But what if your audience wants more of the backing details? Maybe they want to validate and review the detail for themselves. In that case, a   set of  appendix slides  with extra data is sure to help.

Appendix slides are included at the end of a presentation deck for backup purposes. You might not present them, but your audience is certain to appreciate that you included them. That helps your presentation continue to be useful even after you leave the room.

Here's a great tip from: pro presenter  Graeme Thomas of Johnny F Designs:

If (my clients) are sending the deck straight to clients however, I would then put all the information on the slides but will often use more slides so that they aren't too cluttered. In cases where there is a lot of content, like financial statements, I would use  appendix slides.

Including an appendix helps your audience understand data  without  overwhelming them with that data. Follow these tips so that you get the best of both worlds.

26. Alternate Between Solid Color and White Slides

Alternating between solid color and slides with a white background can produce an interesting visual effect and engage your audience. You can use the solid-colored slides to signify a new section in your presentation.

Not to mention, solid-colored slides are the perfect way to re-enforce your brand colors and build your brand recognition.

27. Present Information With Maps

If you’re trying to make a case for a global expansion or need to report on how other branches are performing, consider using a map to help your audience visualize the data.

There's no shortage of quality PowerPoint templates with maps built in so be sure to take advantage of them.

28. Keep the Design Best Practices in Mind

The design of your presentation matters just as much as the content of your presentation. That’s why you need to devote an equal amount of time to making sure the design of your presentation is on point as you do to the actual content.

Familiarize yourself with best design practices and keep them in mind as you go about customizing your template.

29. Set a Time Limit

How many slides is the right number for you? Well, it all depends on the time limit you set for your presentation.

Believe it or not, setting a time limit is helpful to create good PowerPoint slides. If you want to learn how to make a presentable PowerPoint, it's a must to lock in the time limit and ensure that your slides support that timeframe. 

Expert presenter Stephanie Ottavan offers one of our top tips for a good PowerPoint presentation based on time limits:

A presenter is usually limited to a specific time frame and you want to adhere to that as closely as you can. If you have animations and transitions in your deck, these take added time so make sure to rehearse in “show mode” of PowerPoint or Keynote and time yourself.

Believe it or not, setting a time frame is one of the most important part of creating a PPT presentation. It helps you influence how many good PowerPoint slides you should design.

30. Test Your Content Everywhere

PowerPoint in 2024 could take place anywhere. Maybe you present, online, in-person, or beam it to mobile devices. It's important to remember that the content will appear differently on each device.

PowerPoint Online is a different medium than many other apps. Make sure that your presentation design appears the same by testing it with the help of this tutorial. It shows you how your PPT presentation appears even in a browser:

Discover Great Premium PowerPoint Templates With Google Slides (For 2024)

Creating a great presentation starts with a great template. And a great PowerPoint slide design use the best presentation practices, for example:

• Use high-quality photos and graphics to help tell the story.
• Keep text to a minimum.
• Stick to one idea per slide.

Designing a great template doesn’t mean you've got to start from scratch, though. Take a look at some of the best PowerPoint templates we've got on Envato Elements.

1. Neo PowerPoint Template

The Neo PowerPoint template features a modern and bold design and includes five color variations to get you started. Along with this, you'll also get 10 master slides and 30 individual slides for all your presentation needs.

2. Vexana PowerPoint Template

The Vexana template is a great choice for brands that need a touch of elegance. This template works with PowerPoint and Google Slides and comes with a grand total of 150 slides. It also has five color variations and includes infographic elements and photo placeholders.

3. Sprint PowerPoint Template

The Sprint PowerPoint template features a professional and modern design. The template is easy to customize. You'll find 20 masters in the standard 4:3 size, allowing you to choose the best layout for your information.

4. Travelicious PowerPoint Template

For any presentation that deals with the topic of travel, check out the Travelicious template. This template is compatible with both PowerPoint and Google Slides. It includes three premade color variations as well as 30 unique slides.

 As you can see from the examples above, there's no shortage of beautiful and professional PowerPoint slide designs on Envato Elements . What’s more, Envato Elements allows you to download as many PowerPoint templates as you want. Plus, get thousands of other design assets such as fonts, photos, and icons—all for one low monthly price.

Want to see even more great PowerPoint template examples? Be sure to check out our related roundup:

Need Help? Grab Our Making Great Presentations eBook (Free)

We've got the perfect complement to this tutorial. You can find more information in our eBook on making great presentations . Download this PDF eBook now for FREE with your subscription to the Tuts+ Business Newsletter. 

It'll help you master the presentation process from initial creative ideas through to writing, design, and delivering with impact.

PowerPoint Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Now that you’ve read about PowerPoint tips and tricks, if you want to learn more about PowerPoint, here are some FAQs:

1. What Is a Placeholder?

Placeholders in your slide on PowerPoint help you easily add text or images to your slide without changing your design.

In a template, sometimes the placeholders have prompts such as “Click to insert a picture” or “Click to add text.” These prompts let you know what kind of placeholder it is. To learn more about placeholders, read this article: 

2. How Can I Automatically Play a Video?

A PowerPoint tip is to insert an automatically played video in your presentation. When you've got a video that'll play automatically, it saves you the trouble of starting your video manually.

Videos can illustrate topics or specific points. They're also a great way to keep your audience engaged. If you want to learn how to play a video automatically, read this tutorial:

3. How Can I Add a Map to my Slide?

Another PowerPoint trick is to add a map to your slide. If you're discussing a specific location, then a map can help your audience visualize the location you're presenting. To learn how to add a map to your PowerPoint slide, read this tutorial:

4. How Do I Add a GIF to My Presentation?

Adding a GIF to your slide on PowerPoint is one way you can grab your audience's attention. To add a GIF to your slide, you’ll need to download a GIF.

Once you download it, upload it into PowerPoint and use it on your slide. For more information about how to add a GIF to your slide on PowerPoint, read this article:

5. Can I Recover My Unsaved Presentation?

Another PowerPoint trick is to learn how to recover unsaved PowerPoint files so that you can be prepared in case of an emergency. If you want to learn more, read this tutorial:

Learn More About How to Make Presentable PowerPoints

These quick PowerPoint Presentation tips are some of my favorite ways to rapidly improve a presentation. Keeping them in mind while you build a presentation can help you build a deck that you'll be confident about presenting.

Check out these tutorials to keep learning more about PowerPoint. These tutorials will give you more ideas for fixing up your PowerPoint presentation slides efficiently:

Find More Templates

Didn't see a template you like? Here are some more:

Use These PPT Presentation Tips on Your Next Presentation

Now that you've studied some of our best PowerPoint tips, it's time to put them to use. Download one of our top-notch PowerPoint themes from Envato Elements to get started. These PowerPoint presentation tips and tricks give you confidence to make you a skilled presenter.

Editorial Note : This post was first published in February of 2019. Our staff updates this post regularly — adding new, exciting PowerPoint tips and templates (with special help from Brenda Barron , Andrew Childress and Sarah Joy ).

Reduce the file size of your PowerPoint presentations

If the file size of your presentation is too large, try the following tips to make it more manageable.

Compress pictures in your presentation

Select a picture in your document. The Picture Format tab appears.

On the Picture Format tab, in the Adjust group, select Compress Pictures .

Under Compression options , do any of the following:

Make sure that Apply only to this picture is not selected so that the changes you make here will apply to all pictures in the document.

Select Delete cropped areas of pictures . This option removes the cropped picture data but note that if you delete the cropped picture data, you won't be able to restore it.

Under Resolution , select Use default resolution .

Under Compression options , do either of the following:

Select Delete cropped areas of pictures . This option removes the cropped picture data but note that if you delete the cropped picture data, you won't be able to restore it.

Delete image editing data and lower default resolution

By default, when you edit an image, the data from the original is retained (to ensure the image can be restored). Discarding it means that you can't restore the changes you make, but it will reduce your file size. Lowering the default resolution for images also reduces your overall file size.

Go to File > Options > Advanced .

Under Image Size and Quality , do the following:

Select Discard editing data . This option removes stored data that's used to restore the image to its original state after it's been edited. Note that if you discard editing data, you won't be able to restore the image after you edit it.

Make sure that Do not compress images in file is not selected.

Reduce the character set of embedded fonts

To make your presentation more sharable with others who don't have the same fonts in their system, it's typical to embed the fonts you use. However, embedded fonts will increase your file size. To minimize the file increase, embed only those characters used in the presentation.

Go to File > Options > Save .

Note:  If you've used custom fonts and want others to edit the presentation, select Embed all characters .

Reduce the file size of your Excel spreadsheets

Reduce the file size of your Word documents

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Open Access

Ten simple rules for effective presentation slides

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliation Biomedical Engineering and the Center for Public Health Genomics, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, United States of America

• Kristen M. Naegle

Published: December 2, 2021

• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009554
• Reader Comments

Citation: Naegle KM (2021) Ten simple rules for effective presentation slides. PLoS Comput Biol 17(12): e1009554. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009554

Copyright: © 2021 Kristen M. Naegle. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Funding: The author received no specific funding for this work.

Competing interests: The author has declared no competing interests exist.

Introduction

The “presentation slide” is the building block of all academic presentations, whether they are journal clubs, thesis committee meetings, short conference talks, or hour-long seminars. A slide is a single page projected on a screen, usually built on the premise of a title, body, and figures or tables and includes both what is shown and what is spoken about that slide. Multiple slides are strung together to tell the larger story of the presentation. While there have been excellent 10 simple rules on giving entire presentations [ 1 , 2 ], there was an absence in the fine details of how to design a slide for optimal effect—such as the design elements that allow slides to convey meaningful information, to keep the audience engaged and informed, and to deliver the information intended and in the time frame allowed. As all research presentations seek to teach, effective slide design borrows from the same principles as effective teaching, including the consideration of cognitive processing your audience is relying on to organize, process, and retain information. This is written for anyone who needs to prepare slides from any length scale and for most purposes of conveying research to broad audiences. The rules are broken into 3 primary areas. Rules 1 to 5 are about optimizing the scope of each slide. Rules 6 to 8 are about principles around designing elements of the slide. Rules 9 to 10 are about preparing for your presentation, with the slides as the central focus of that preparation.

Rule 1: Include only one idea per slide

Each slide should have one central objective to deliver—the main idea or question [ 3 – 5 ]. Often, this means breaking complex ideas down into manageable pieces (see Fig 1 , where “background” information has been split into 2 key concepts). In another example, if you are presenting a complex computational approach in a large flow diagram, introduce it in smaller units, building it up until you finish with the entire diagram. The progressive buildup of complex information means that audiences are prepared to understand the whole picture, once you have dedicated time to each of the parts. You can accomplish the buildup of components in several ways—for example, using presentation software to cover/uncover information. Personally, I choose to create separate slides for each piece of information content I introduce—where the final slide has the entire diagram, and I use cropping or a cover on duplicated slides that come before to hide what I’m not yet ready to include. I use this method in order to ensure that each slide in my deck truly presents one specific idea (the new content) and the amount of the new information on that slide can be described in 1 minute (Rule 2), but it comes with the trade-off—a change to the format of one of the slides in the series often means changes to all slides.

• PPT PowerPoint slide
• PNG larger image
• TIFF original image

Top left: A background slide that describes the background material on a project from my lab. The slide was created using a PowerPoint Design Template, which had to be modified to increase default text sizes for this figure (i.e., the default text sizes are even worse than shown here). Bottom row: The 2 new slides that break up the content into 2 explicit ideas about the background, using a central graphic. In the first slide, the graphic is an explicit example of the SH2 domain of PI3-kinase interacting with a phosphorylation site (Y754) on the PDGFR to describe the important details of what an SH2 domain and phosphotyrosine ligand are and how they interact. I use that same graphic in the second slide to generalize all binding events and include redundant text to drive home the central message (a lot of possible interactions might occur in the human proteome, more than we can currently measure). Top right highlights which rules were used to move from the original slide to the new slide. Specific changes as highlighted by Rule 7 include increasing contrast by changing the background color, increasing font size, changing to sans serif fonts, and removing all capital text and underlining (using bold to draw attention). PDGFR, platelet-derived growth factor receptor.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009554.g001

Rule 2: Spend only 1 minute per slide

When you present your slide in the talk, it should take 1 minute or less to discuss. This rule is really helpful for planning purposes—a 20-minute presentation should have somewhere around 20 slides. Also, frequently giving your audience new information to feast on helps keep them engaged. During practice, if you find yourself spending more than a minute on a slide, there’s too much for that one slide—it’s time to break up the content into multiple slides or even remove information that is not wholly central to the story you are trying to tell. Reduce, reduce, reduce, until you get to a single message, clearly described, which takes less than 1 minute to present.

Rule 3: Make use of your heading

When each slide conveys only one message, use the heading of that slide to write exactly the message you are trying to deliver. Instead of titling the slide “Results,” try “CTNND1 is central to metastasis” or “False-positive rates are highly sample specific.” Use this landmark signpost to ensure that all the content on that slide is related exactly to the heading and only the heading. Think of the slide heading as the introductory or concluding sentence of a paragraph and the slide content the rest of the paragraph that supports the main point of the paragraph. An audience member should be able to follow along with you in the “paragraph” and come to the same conclusion sentence as your header at the end of the slide.

Rule 4: Include only essential points

While you are speaking, audience members’ eyes and minds will be wandering over your slide. If you have a comment, detail, or figure on a slide, have a plan to explicitly identify and talk about it. If you don’t think it’s important enough to spend time on, then don’t have it on your slide. This is especially important when faculty are present. I often tell students that thesis committee members are like cats: If you put a shiny bauble in front of them, they’ll go after it. Be sure to only put the shiny baubles on slides that you want them to focus on. Putting together a thesis meeting for only faculty is really an exercise in herding cats (if you have cats, you know this is no easy feat). Clear and concise slide design will go a long way in helping you corral those easily distracted faculty members.

Rule 5: Give credit, where credit is due

An exception to Rule 4 is to include proper citations or references to work on your slide. When adding citations, names of other researchers, or other types of credit, use a consistent style and method for adding this information to your slides. Your audience will then be able to easily partition this information from the other content. A common mistake people make is to think “I’ll add that reference later,” but I highly recommend you put the proper reference on the slide at the time you make it, before you forget where it came from. Finally, in certain kinds of presentations, credits can make it clear who did the work. For the faculty members heading labs, it is an effective way to connect your audience with the personnel in the lab who did the work, which is a great career booster for that person. For graduate students, it is an effective way to delineate your contribution to the work, especially in meetings where the goal is to establish your credentials for meeting the rigors of a PhD checkpoint.

Rule 6: Use graphics effectively

As a rule, you should almost never have slides that only contain text. Build your slides around good visualizations. It is a visual presentation after all, and as they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. However, on the flip side, don’t muddy the point of the slide by putting too many complex graphics on a single slide. A multipanel figure that you might include in a manuscript should often be broken into 1 panel per slide (see Rule 1 ). One way to ensure that you use the graphics effectively is to make a point to introduce the figure and its elements to the audience verbally, especially for data figures. For example, you might say the following: “This graph here shows the measured false-positive rate for an experiment and each point is a replicate of the experiment, the graph demonstrates …” If you have put too much on one slide to present in 1 minute (see Rule 2 ), then the complexity or number of the visualizations is too much for just one slide.

Rule 7: Design to avoid cognitive overload

The type of slide elements, the number of them, and how you present them all impact the ability for the audience to intake, organize, and remember the content. For example, a frequent mistake in slide design is to include full sentences, but reading and verbal processing use the same cognitive channels—therefore, an audience member can either read the slide, listen to you, or do some part of both (each poorly), as a result of cognitive overload [ 4 ]. The visual channel is separate, allowing images/videos to be processed with auditory information without cognitive overload [ 6 ] (Rule 6). As presentations are an exercise in listening, and not reading, do what you can to optimize the ability of the audience to listen. Use words sparingly as “guide posts” to you and the audience about major points of the slide. In fact, you can add short text fragments, redundant with the verbal component of the presentation, which has been shown to improve retention [ 7 ] (see Fig 1 for an example of redundant text that avoids cognitive overload). Be careful in the selection of a slide template to minimize accidentally adding elements that the audience must process, but are unimportant. David JP Phillips argues (and effectively demonstrates in his TEDx talk [ 5 ]) that the human brain can easily interpret 6 elements and more than that requires a 500% increase in human cognition load—so keep the total number of elements on the slide to 6 or less. Finally, in addition to the use of short text, white space, and the effective use of graphics/images, you can improve ease of cognitive processing further by considering color choices and font type and size. Here are a few suggestions for improving the experience for your audience, highlighting the importance of these elements for some specific groups:

• Use high contrast colors and simple backgrounds with low to no color—for persons with dyslexia or visual impairment.
• Use sans serif fonts and large font sizes (including figure legends), avoid italics, underlining (use bold font instead for emphasis), and all capital letters—for persons with dyslexia or visual impairment [ 8 ].
• Use color combinations and palettes that can be understood by those with different forms of color blindness [ 9 ]. There are excellent tools available to identify colors to use and ways to simulate your presentation or figures as they might be seen by a person with color blindness (easily found by a web search).
• In this increasing world of virtual presentation tools, consider practicing your talk with a closed captioning system capture your words. Use this to identify how to improve your speaking pace, volume, and annunciation to improve understanding by all members of your audience, but especially those with a hearing impairment.

Rule 8: Design the slide so that a distracted person gets the main takeaway

It is very difficult to stay focused on a presentation, especially if it is long or if it is part of a longer series of talks at a conference. Audience members may get distracted by an important email, or they may start dreaming of lunch. So, it’s important to look at your slide and ask “If they heard nothing I said, will they understand the key concept of this slide?” The other rules are set up to help with this, including clarity of the single point of the slide (Rule 1), titling it with a major conclusion (Rule 3), and the use of figures (Rule 6) and short text redundant to your verbal description (Rule 7). However, with each slide, step back and ask whether its main conclusion is conveyed, even if someone didn’t hear your accompanying dialog. Importantly, ask if the information on the slide is at the right level of abstraction. For example, do you have too many details about the experiment, which hides the conclusion of the experiment (i.e., breaking Rule 1)? If you are worried about not having enough details, keep a slide at the end of your slide deck (after your conclusions and acknowledgments) with the more detailed information that you can refer to during a question and answer period.

Rule 9: Iteratively improve slide design through practice

Well-designed slides that follow the first 8 rules are intended to help you deliver the message you intend and in the amount of time you intend to deliver it in. The best way to ensure that you nailed slide design for your presentation is to practice, typically a lot. The most important aspects of practicing a new presentation, with an eye toward slide design, are the following 2 key points: (1) practice to ensure that you hit, each time through, the most important points (for example, the text guide posts you left yourself and the title of the slide); and (2) practice to ensure that as you conclude the end of one slide, it leads directly to the next slide. Slide transitions, what you say as you end one slide and begin the next, are important to keeping the flow of the “story.” Practice is when I discover that the order of my presentation is poor or that I left myself too few guideposts to remember what was coming next. Additionally, during practice, the most frequent things I have to improve relate to Rule 2 (the slide takes too long to present, usually because I broke Rule 1, and I’m delivering too much information for one slide), Rule 4 (I have a nonessential detail on the slide), and Rule 5 (I forgot to give a key reference). The very best type of practice is in front of an audience (for example, your lab or peers), where, with fresh perspectives, they can help you identify places for improving slide content, design, and connections across the entirety of your talk.

Rule 10: Design to mitigate the impact of technical disasters

The real presentation almost never goes as we planned in our heads or during our practice. Maybe the speaker before you went over time and now you need to adjust. Maybe the computer the organizer is having you use won’t show your video. Maybe your internet is poor on the day you are giving a virtual presentation at a conference. Technical problems are routinely part of the practice of sharing your work through presentations. Hence, you can design your slides to limit the impact certain kinds of technical disasters create and also prepare alternate approaches. Here are just a few examples of the preparation you can do that will take you a long way toward avoiding a complete fiasco:

• Save your presentation as a PDF—if the version of Keynote or PowerPoint on a host computer cause issues, you still have a functional copy that has a higher guarantee of compatibility.
• In using videos, create a backup slide with screen shots of key results. For example, if I have a video of cell migration, I’ll be sure to have a copy of the start and end of the video, in case the video doesn’t play. Even if the video worked, you can pause on this backup slide and take the time to highlight the key results in words if someone could not see or understand the video.
• Avoid animations, such as figures or text that flash/fly-in/etc. Surveys suggest that no one likes movement in presentations [ 3 , 4 ]. There is likely a cognitive underpinning to the almost universal distaste of pointless animations that relates to the idea proposed by Kosslyn and colleagues that animations are salient perceptual units that captures direct attention [ 4 ]. Although perceptual salience can be used to draw attention to and improve retention of specific points, if you use this approach for unnecessary/unimportant things (like animation of your bullet point text, fly-ins of figures, etc.), then you will distract your audience from the important content. Finally, animations cause additional processing burdens for people with visual impairments [ 10 ] and create opportunities for technical disasters if the software on the host system is not compatible with your planned animation.

Conclusions

These rules are just a start in creating more engaging presentations that increase audience retention of your material. However, there are wonderful resources on continuing on the journey of becoming an amazing public speaker, which includes understanding the psychology and neuroscience behind human perception and learning. For example, as highlighted in Rule 7, David JP Phillips has a wonderful TEDx talk on the subject [ 5 ], and “PowerPoint presentation flaws and failures: A psychological analysis,” by Kosslyn and colleagues is deeply detailed about a number of aspects of human cognition and presentation style [ 4 ]. There are many books on the topic, including the popular “Presentation Zen” by Garr Reynolds [ 11 ]. Finally, although briefly touched on here, the visualization of data is an entire topic of its own that is worth perfecting for both written and oral presentations of work, with fantastic resources like Edward Tufte’s “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information” [ 12 ] or the article “Visualization of Biomedical Data” by O’Donoghue and colleagues [ 13 ].

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the countless presenters, colleagues, students, and mentors from which I have learned a great deal from on effective presentations. Also, a thank you to the wonderful resources published by organizations on how to increase inclusivity. A special thanks to Dr. Jason Papin and Dr. Michael Guertin on early feedback of this editorial.

• View Article
• PubMed/NCBI
• Google Scholar
• 3. Teaching VUC for Making Better PowerPoint Presentations. n.d. Available from: https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/guides-sub-pages/making-better-powerpoint-presentations/#baddeley .
• 8. Creating a dyslexia friendly workplace. Dyslexia friendly style guide. nd. Available from: https://www.bdadyslexia.org.uk/advice/employers/creating-a-dyslexia-friendly-workplace/dyslexia-friendly-style-guide .
• 9. Cravit R. How to Use Color Blind Friendly Palettes to Make Your Charts Accessible. 2019. Available from: https://venngage.com/blog/color-blind-friendly-palette/ .
• 10. Making your conference presentation more accessible to blind and partially sighted people. n.d. Available from: https://vocaleyes.co.uk/services/resources/guidelines-for-making-your-conference-presentation-more-accessible-to-blind-and-partially-sighted-people/ .
• 11. Reynolds G. Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery. 2nd ed. New Riders Pub; 2011.
• 12. Tufte ER. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. 2nd ed. Graphics Press; 2001.

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Flip students’ presentations for more in-depth learning

Ask students to record presentations ahead of class, in order to free up time for in-depth questions, discussion and feedback when together in person, and enable fairer assessment

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What is flipped learning? 

It is a pedagogical approach in which “direct instruction moves from the group learning space to the individual learning space”, according to the Flipped Learning Network . What this means in practice is, typically, students engage with recorded lectures or other learning materials to build their knowledge on a topic ahead of their live class.

This changes the classroom into “a dynamic, interactive learning environment where the educator guides students as they apply concepts and engage creatively in the subject matter”. 

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Traditionally, flipped learning activities have included students playing pre-recorded lectures, completing allocated reading or other preparatory materials, participating in online discussions and peer-to-peer sharing outside class time. However, one underexplored activity in flipped learning is student presentations.

Presentations are often used as an effective way for students to demonstrate their mastery of concepts and principles. This can include articulating what they already know, applying learned theories to solve real-world problems, and demonstrating their ability to ask more in-depth questions, a key element of Socratic learning – learning by asking questions in a cascading fashion .

But staging student presentations during classes can be difficult, owing to constraints on time. Typically, a project team comprises four to five students. Each student presents one aspect of a project and is individually assessed. Assuming the teacher allocates one three-hour session for this activity, for a class size of 40 to 50 students, each student has only two to three minutes for their presentation. A whole team’s presentation, including Q&A, discussion and teacher feedback, can last up to 20 minutes. This is hardly sufficient time for the teacher to ask in-depth questions, offer feedback for improvement or for students to respond comprehensively.

Students waiting to present are too focused on their own impending performance to properly learn from their peers. 

Plus, with the advancement of artificial intelligence tools , teachers need to determine if a student’s presentation slides have been partially or wholly generated by AI and, if so, judge what the student has actually learned. 

At PolyU, we have been experimenting with flipping student presentations. Many subjects include assessed projects, and we apply flipped learning to project team presentations.

How do flipped presentations work?

We ask students to pre-record their project presentations in their teams before presentation day. The teacher watches the recorded presentations beforehand. During the class presentation time, students do not need to present the whole project but can be asked to:

• Re-present selective slides
• Clarify various parts of their presentation
• Elaborate on specific issues that may or may not have been highlighted in their presentation
• Respond to hypothetical questions, such as “what-if” scenarios, about their project.

Our experience, informed by feedback from teachers and students, has shown that this flipped learning approach to student presentations frees up a lot of time for teachers to ask in-depth questions, further discuss specific issues with students and provide feedback to teams as well as the whole class. 

Reviewing the recorded presentations prior to presentation day means the teacher arrives better informed about the overall performance, common mistakes and areas for improvement. This leads to fairer assessments for all students and highlights areas of focus for future teaching. Marks are not allocated until the project presentation session is over.

Other benefits of this approach include:

• Students are able to review or rate peer presentations
• Students can refine their work before they formally submit
• It facilitates active learning  
• It provides a digital record of all deliverables
• It results in a repository of representative student work.

As the teacher often sets a maximum recording duration for each video, students have to practise time management in their presentations.

In terms of technology, we use Flip.com, a free educational tool for gathering and managing videos. Videos can be grouped, copied and remixed with different user access privileges. The tool also comes with a badging system to decorate users at various levels of contributions. Microsoft has announced the migration of Flip into MS Teams from Q4 2024.

Eric Tsui is a professor at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

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