We know your presentations don’t mean to be bad; they’re just designed that way. Follow these guidelines to improve your presentations and reduce the needless suffering of audiences and presenters world-wide. It’s quite simple: a PowerPoint® presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points, hence the 10,20,30 presenting rule name.
This rule is applicable for any presentation to reach agreement: for example, raising capital, making a sale, forming a partnership, etc
10. Ten is the optimal number of slides in a PowerPoint® presentation because a normal human being cannot comprehend more than ten concepts in a meeting. You then can interact with your audience and have other slides to refer to.
20. You should give your ten slides in twenty minutes. Sure, you have an hour time slot, but people will arrive late and have to leave early. In a perfect world, you give your pitch in twenty minutes, and you have forty minutes left for interaction.
30. The majority of the presentations we see have text in a 12 point font. As much text as possible is jammed into the slide, and then the presenter reads it.
However, as soon as the audience figures out that you’re reading the text, it reads ahead of you because it can read faster than you can speak. The result is that you and the audience are out of synch. The reason people use a small font is twofold: first, that they don’t know their material well enough; second, they think that more text is more convincing. Force yourself to use no font smaller than thirty points. We guarantee it will make your presentations better because it requires you to find the most salient points and to know how to explain them well.
We promise if you observe the 10,20,30 Presenting Rule of PowerPoint® your audience will thank you.
Author: John Quinn