Many people wonder how many slides they should make for their presentation. There are many standards for how many slides you should have in a presentation. Since visual stimuli is dominant medium for spreading information in today’s world, we need to take a few tips from television to evolve the standard further.
All Slides Look The Same
The concept of changing 7-10 slides per minute, works because most people have a similar attention span. If you keep showing the same slide for too long, then people might tune-out unless they’re really curious about what you’re saying. People won’t pay attention if most of your slides look the same.
Use Various Different Visuals
Instead of just adding identical slides, you need to change the slides visually. This means giving people something new to look at. You should use a few different types of slides. Use large charts and images to get the audience’s attention.
Stay Within The Threshold
Not only do you need to be careful not to go over the audience’s attention span, but you also need to be careful to not overload the audience’s capacity for information intake. Only give them enough information that they can easily observe and understand within the time that the slide stays on screen. This means that you will need to simplify some slides. This will result in more slides. Also, at the end of a topic, review all points in the topic so that people don’t need to piece everything together themselves. This also helps people know that the topic is ending.
No Easy Answer
In the end, there’s no easy answer to the question “how many slides should I use?”. It depends on your audience’s attention span. Your job is to keep your audience’s attention throughout the presentation.
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