The question about the number of slides comes back to me at every training session. People want one number. Preferably a round one. Ten, twenty, something you can write on a sticky note and stop worrying about.
I have to disappoint you. There is no single number.
It depends. And I will explain right away on what.
A presentation sent by email is a completely different convention
Let’s start with the simplest case. You send a presentation by email, no one presents it live, the recipient opens the file alone at their own desk.
Here the rule is simple: the fewer slides, the better.
Nobody wants to scroll through forty slides on a Monday morning. The recipient is supposed to grasp the meaning in a few moments and make a decision. Every unnecessary slide is another reason to put the file off until later. And „later” in an email usually means „never”.
A presentation meant for self-reading follows the logic of a document, not a talk. It should be concise, specific and ready for a decision.
A live presentation? The number of slides does not matter
This is where the real shift in thinking begins.
When you stand in front of people and present in person, the number of slides stops being important. Really.
Something else matters. What matters is how much TIME your presentation will take.
A slide is just a frame. You can have a slide you stay on for three minutes, and you can have a slide that flashes by for two seconds as an element of the story’s rhythm. Counting slides alone, detached from time, says nothing about the quality of a talk.
Business and stage presentations are two different worlds
Here I have to introduce a distinction that few people talk about.
A conference presentation, a stage one, in front of a large audience, follows a different logic than a business presentation in a meeting room for five people.
Let me give you a concrete example from my own backyard. When I prepare a stage presentation, my average is about 120 slides for 18 minutes. Yes, one hundred and twenty. Because on stage slides work like film frames. They build pace, rhythm, emotion. They change fast and drive the narrative.
If, however, I had to make a business presentation for those same 18 minutes, I would make between 30 and 50 slides. A completely different format, a completely different dynamic, the same amount of time.
Do you see the difference? The same length of talk, and the number of slides differs several times over. Because the goal is different, the room is different and the way you work with a slide is different.
The „1 minute = 1 slide” rule no longer works
You probably know the old rule: one minute per slide. Convenient, easy to remember, repeated for years.
In my opinion there is no point in sticking to it.
We live in a TikTok society. Everyone expects a new stimulus every moment, and the audience’s attention is shorter than ever. A minute of staring at one still image is really long these days. It’s an eternity. In that time the recipient will check their phone, drift off in thought and come back already tired.
That is why my ratio is different.
One minute for about two slides.
But I want to make one thing clear: this is a very general approach. It depends on all the factors I wrote about above. On whether you present live or send it by email. Whether it’s a stage or a meeting room. Whether you build emotion or deliver hard data for a decision.
What follows from this?
There is no point in asking yourself „how many slides should a presentation have”. It’s better to ask:
- Where will I show this presentation?
- How much time do I have?
- What effect do I want to achieve?
The answers to these three questions will tell you more about the number of slides than any round rule from the internet.
The „10 slides” rule sounds good because it’s simple. But simplicity that doesn’t fit reality is not simplicity. It’s just a mistake in nice packaging.
If you want to learn how to build presentations that hit the mark regardless of format, ask me about presentation training. During my training we focus on how to create effective presentations, whether they are in a business or a stage convention.