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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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Microsoft 365 Life Hacks > Presentations > Implementing The 10-20-30 Rule of PowerPoint

Implementing The 10-20-30 Rule of PowerPoint

If you’re not used to making a PowerPoint presentation , it can be tough to know how long to make it and how to format the slides. On the other side of the coin: you might overthink your presentation and put too much information on too many slides.

With help from the 10-20-30 rule, you can make a PowerPoint presentation that’s engaging and efficient . The guidelines for this rule are as follows:

• No more than 10 slides.
• No longer than 20 minutes.
• No larger than 30-point font.

Let’s look deeper at the 10-20-30 PowerPoint rule, why it’s a good rule to follow and things to do to follow this guideline.

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Don’t use more than 10 slides. A good presenter shouldn’t have to (or want to) lean heavily on their PowerPoint slides. The slides should be a supplement for your presentation, not the headliner. Limiting to 10 slides will ensure that you’re not going over the top with the length of your presentation and keeps it moving. Your slide count should include both your title and conclusion. A presentation that goes on any longer than 10 slides will distract from what you’re saying and starts to feel like an information overload.

Keep your presentation 20 minutes MAX. During a presentation, people start tuning out after about 10 minutes.Limiting your presentation to this length will ensure that your audience will remember much of what you’re saying. If you’re covering a more complex topic and need more time, stick to the 20-minute MAX rule—it’s much easier to schedule your presentation by timing each slide down to about two minutes. That feels like a much more manageable timeframe, doesn’t it?

Don’t use fonts smaller than size 30. A 30-point font is a great minimum size because it ensures that your text is easy to read from a distance. The recommended guideline to make your presentation accessible to those who might be visually impaired is a 24-point font. Upping the size to 30 is a significant difference, and you can be confident that your audience can see what you’ve written. In addition, choose a font that’s easy to read. For years it was recommended that you stick solely to sans-serif fonts with digital media because serifs could blur together, making certain fonts hard to read. High-resolution screens have nearly eliminated this problem, so some serif fonts can be used and are easy to read in PowerPoint presentations.

Tips for sticking to these guidelines. It’s not always easy to cut down your presentation to fit the 30-20-10 rule if you’re presenting a lot of information. Follow these tips while putting together your presentation to make the entire process easier on yourself:

• Limit text to the 6×6 rule. It can feel like there are a lot of rules for making a PowerPoint presentation, but they’re all there to help you make a well-organized and engaging presentation. The 6×6 rule suggests that you don’t use more than six lines or bullet points on each slide and limit each line or bullet point to six words. Following the 6×6 rule helps to ensure that you’re limiting the amount of information on your slides so you can continue to present it rather than have your audience read it.
• Use visuals instead. Visuals like graphics, animated gifs, and videos can help to keep your audience engaged . Including visuals with your presentation will also help you limit the amount of time and content on each slide. A graph or illustration on the right side of your slide limits the amount of space you have on the left side. This can help to minimize the amount of text you have.
• Practice makes perfect. There’s a very cool, free tool called PowerPoint Speaker Coach , which leverages AI to help you nail your presentation. Speaker coach gives you feedback on your pace, pitch, use of filler words, poor grammar, lack of originality, use of sensitive phrases, and more as you rehearse your presentation. You’ll get a Summary Report at the end—with key pieces of feedback to help you become a confident presenter .

Use the 10-20-30 PowerPoint rule and these other tips to keep your presentation simple. Whether you’re a college student presenting a class project or a teen making the case for a new car, following these guidelines will help.

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Home Blog Presentation Ideas Understanding the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint Presentations

Understanding the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint Presentations

Imagine sitting through a seemingly never-ending presentation. The speaker rambled on, reading from text-heavy slides, using a tiny font that strained your eyes, and failing to connect with the audience. As the minutes ticked by, you found yourself daydreaming and eagerly awaiting the end of the ordeal.

If you have been in this situation, then you know what to do if you were in the presenter’s shoes – make your presentations concise. But how do you even start?

You can follow several techniques when preparing your deck and your presentation as a whole. One of them is the 10/20/30 rule of PowerPoint , a presentation rule championed by Guy Kawasaki – a former Apple employee and a marketing specialist.

Table of Contents

What Is the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint Presentations?

Applying guy kawasaki’s 10 slide template in any presentation, the 20 minutes rule, the 30-point font rule, the benefits of using the 10/20/30 rule, tips for applying the 10/20/30 rule to your presentation.

The idea of the 10/20/30 rule is easy to understand, which is summed up in three points.

• Your presentation should consist of no more than 10 slides .
• Your presentation should last no longer than 20 minutes .
• The text on each slide should be no lower than 30 points in size .

Guy Kawasaki’s 10-20-30 rule for slideshows emphasizes brevity, focus, and visual appeal to keep your audience engaged and deliver your message effectively.

Let’s examine each rule and explore how to apply it to your presentations.

The 10 Slides Rule

Kawasaki argues that a typical person can only take 10 concepts in one sitting. Therefore, according to him, a presentation should only consist of 10 slides, each serving a specific purpose and conveying a distinct concept.

This insight underscores the importance of concise, focused presentations that prioritize key messages and avoid overwhelming the audience with too much information.

If you are a business presenter struggling to develop a pitch deck , Kawasaki suggests a 10-slide PowerPoint template that includes what venture capitalists like him care about.

• Title – Includes the business name, the presenter’s name, contacts, etc.
• Problem/Opportunity – Highlights pain points or unmet needs of customers you aim to solve.
• Value Proposition – Articulates the value or benefits of your product or service.
• Underlying Magic – Explains the key technology that goes into your product or service offers.
• Business Model – Describes how you plan to generate revenue.
• Go-to-Market Plan – Outlines your strategy for bringing your product or service to market, e.g., marketing and sales plan .
• Competitive Analysis – Explains how your business is positioned to compete and capture market share.
• Management Team – Highlights your management team’s skills, experience, and expertise that will drive the success of your business.
• Financial Projections and Key Metrics – Highlights your business’s financial viability and potential profitability.
• Current Status, Accomplishments to Date, Timeline, and Use of Funds – Provides an overview of your current business status, any accomplishments or milestones achieved to date, the timeline for future milestones, and how you plan to use the funds you seek.

The 10 rule slide was specifically designed for startup and business presentations , focusing on pitching a business idea or concept to potential investors . However, it can also be a useful framework for other types of presentations that don’t deal with selling a service or product.

For example, if you are a lecturer, you can emulate Kawasaki’s PowerPoint template layout and reduce your presentation to 10 slides. Some slides might not be relevant to the nature of your topic, so replace them with one that works for your presentation. Using PPT templates helps you focus on the graphical aspect so you can articulate the content to fit into exactly 10 slides (while preserving the same aesthetic).

Let’s say you are a mindfulness expert talking about the benefits of meditation. The first three slides of Kawazaki’s workflow may be applied as you’ll need to establish your audience’s pain points and your solution.

However, you may need to modify the remaining slides as you’re not seeking to make a sale or raise funding. You may use them instead to discuss the main content of your presentation – in this case, the benefits of meditation. The last two slides may contain your conclusions and call to action, respectively.

Now, off to the second part of the 10/20/30 presentation rule.

According to Kawasaki, you only have 20 minutes to present your 10 slides – the time needed before your audience’s attention starts declining. He believes it is long enough to convey a meaningful message but short enough to maintain the audience’s attention span.

This is exactly why most TED Talks or The Big Bang Theory episodes would only last for approximately 18 minutes. 

While giving longer presentations is possible, longer presentations may be more difficult to maintain audience engagement and attention.

Kawasaki’s final rule pertains to the font size that presenters can use. This rule suggests that presenters should use a font size of at least 30 points for all text in their slides , including titles, headings, and body text.

When creating presentations, it is common to jam each slide with text and information. This poses two possible problems:

• First, it may take your audience’s attention from you as they may end up reading your whole presentation and stop listening to you. 
• Second, including too much information can make your presentation overwhelming and difficult to follow.

Using a larger font size, you must include only the key points of your presentation slides. This prevents your audience from getting ahead of you and keeps them listening to you speak. By applying this rule, you are also ensuring your content is understandable for people with visual impairments. We highly recommend you check concepts from W3C.org on how to make events accessible, as some of these rules can benefit your audience.

Presenters often ask themselves whether is worth applying a new framework for their presentation design and delivery. The reality is that the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint Presentations is one of the most effective methods to build your presentation skills . In the list below, we expose the main benefits of this framework for presenters.

Concise and Focused Presentation

With a limited number of slides and a strict time limit, the 10/20/30 encourages you to choose the most relevant content and eliminate unnecessary information carefully. This avoids overwhelming your audience with too much information and ensures your key message is clear and memorable.

Improved Audience Engagement

This rule encourages presenters to focus on delivering a clear message rather than overwhelming the audience with flashy visuals. With fewer slides and a shorter duration, you are likelier to hold your audience’s attention throughout the presentation. This also allows you to address questions from the audience, leading to better interaction and a productive meeting.

Increased Chance of Success

Whether pitching to investors or selling a product, a concise and focused presentation can significantly increase your chances of success. The 10/20/30 rule helps you effectively communicate your value proposition and address potential concerns. This makes your presentation more persuasive and memorable, increasing the likelihood of securing funding or closing a sale.

Time Management

The more senior the person you present to, the lesser time you got to make your case and convey your message. Following the 10/20/30 encourages you to be mindful of the time and deliver your presentation within the allocated timeframe. It also allows you to show respect for your audience’s time.

1. Present One Idea Per Slide

Following Kawasaki’s rule on creating your PowerPoint presentation, identify the key points you want to convey to your audience and allocate one slide for each.

Presenting one idea per slide can help your audience stay focused on the topic at hand.  It makes it easier for them to understand and remember your message, as it reduces the amount of information they have to process at once. When there’s too much information on a slide, it can be overwhelming and distracting, making it difficult for your audience to stay engaged and attentive.

Presenting one idea per slide can also help you control the flow of information and ensure that you cover all of your main points.

2. Keep Your Slides Simple

As mentioned earlier, the 10/20/30 rule emphasizes simplicity. Keep your slides simple and avoid flashy design elements that may distract your audience.

Use a consistent color scheme , font style, and layout throughout your presentation. This will help your audience follow along and focus on your message.

3. Balance Text and Visuals

Visuals like images, charts, graphs, videos, and diagrams can help break up text-heavy slides and make your presentation more interesting and memorable. However, relying solely on images can also be ineffective and lead to confusion or disengagement.

When using visuals in your slides, it’s important to balance text and images. Text can provide important context and details, while images can help illustrate key points and make your presentation visually appealing.

Let’s say you want to inform your audience of your company’s marketing plan . Using a rising spiral template is an excellent choice since it can represent multiple plan stages with increasing intensity.

4. Break Down Your Presentation into Smaller Units and Make it Interactive

Kawasaki’s 10/20/30 rule only gives you 20 minutes to wrap up the whole presentation, but what if you need more than that?

It’s not uncommon to give presentations that last 45 minutes to an hour – for instance, if you are giving a lecture or facilitating a training workshop for employees. The longer your presentation, however, the harder it will be to hold your audience’s attention.

One great way to keep them engaged is to divide your presentation into smaller units and pause in between.

So, before the guy from the third row starts yawning, plan in-between activities to reenergize your audience and reacquire their attention. It can be a simple Q&A session, interactive exercises, or team-building activities.

Don’t forget to time your activities so they won’t disrupt the flow of your presentation.

5. Start Strong

The opening of your presentation is critical in capturing your audience’s attention and setting the tone for the rest of the presentation. Start with a compelling hook, such as a thought-provoking question, a powerful quote, or an engaging story, to grab your audience’s attention. Clearly state the purpose and objectives of your presentation to establish the context and provide a roadmap for what’s to come.

6. End Strong

Your outro is as important as your introduction. So, instead of ending your presentation with a flat Thank you slide , use the opportunity to nudge your audience to action.

Using a summary slide is one of the ways you can end your presentation if your goal is to reinforce your key points. It can be a useful reference for the audience, helping them remember the most important information.

You can also encourage your audience to take action based on what they’ve learned in your presentation. This can be a great way to motivate them to apply the concepts you’ve covered.

The 10/20/30 rule of PowerPoint is a useful framework to emulate in creating your presentation.

There are questions about the practicality of its application outside the business context. However, we can agree that it teaches us valuable insight – keeping presentations concise as possible. Limiting the number of slides, adhering to a strict time limit, and using a larger font size can create a concise presentation that effectively communicates your message.

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to presenting; you don’t have to strictly follow Kawasaki’s rule. Depending on the audience and the topic, modify the template and adapt your presentation to suit the situation.

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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.

The 10 Slides, 20 Minutes and 30 Point Font Rule for Presentations

• By Judhajit Sen
• May 14, 2024

What separates a good presentation from a dreadful one? Picture this: a never-ending talk that drones on for over 30 minutes, bombarding you with slide after slide, each crammed with tiny text. By the time the speaker finishes, most of the audience is either sleeping, scrolling through their phones, or daydreaming. What went wrong? And more importantly, how can you avoid such a fate in your PowerPoint presentations? Enter the 10-20-30 Rule, your savior from presentation purgatory.

Presentations are everywhere – in school, work, and even casual settings like PowerPoint parties. But crafting a compelling one requires careful consideration. You must choose a topic that resonates, organize your content logically, design visually appealing slides, adhere to a reasonable time limit, and master your delivery style. It’s not just about sharing information; it’s also about  engaging the audience .

Guy Kawasaki, a former Apple employee and marketing guru, champions a simple yet powerful principle: the 10-20-30 Rule of PowerPoint. This rule advocates for brevity, recommending no more than ten slides, a maximum duration of 20 minutes, and a font size of 30 points minimum. It’s a game-changer in presentations, emphasizing clarity, conciseness, and connection with your audience.

In an era where effective communication reigns supreme, mastering the art of presentations is essential for success. Guy Kawasaki’s 10-20-30 Rule offers a beacon of guidance, reshaping how we approach and deliver business plan and marketing presentations. So, let’s dive in and discover its transformative power together.

Key Takeaways 

• Brevity is Key: Guy Kawasaki’s 10-20-30 Rule stresses brevity in presentations, limiting slides to 10, duration to 20 minutes, and font size to 30 points. This ensures the concise delivery of essential information without overwhelming the audience.
• Optimize Engagement: By adhering to the rule, presenters can optimize audience engagement . Shorter presentations and larger font sizes maintain audience attention, leading to better retention of key points and increased comprehension.
• Versatile Application: While initially designed for business pitches, the 10-20-30 Rule is adaptable across various contexts. Teachers, students, and professionals from any field can leverage its principles to craft compelling presentations that resonate with their audience.
• Simplicity Matters: Simplifying presentations using Kawasaki’s rule allows presenters to focus on delivering impactful messages. By emphasizing clarity and conciseness, presenters can make a lasting impression regardless of the presentation’s objective.

Defining The 10-20-30 Rule

The 10-20-30 Rule is a simple yet powerful guide for crafting effective presentations. Coined by Guy Kawasaki, a renowned figure in Silicon Valley, this presentation outline rule emphasizes brevity, clarity, and visual impact to captivate your audience and convey your message efficiently.

Guy Kawasaki, drawing from his experience as a venture capitalist, observed the essence of a successful presentation and distilled it into three key components:

1. Conciseness: Limit your presentation to just ten slides.

2. Time Management: Keep your presentation within a 20-minute timeframe.

3. Readability: Ensure that the font size on each slide is at least 30 points.

This rule isn’t just about numbers; it’s about optimizing your presentation’s impact. Adhering to these guidelines can create engaging and memorable presentations that resonate with your audience. Whether you pitch a business idea or deliver a report, the 10-20-30 Rule serves as a blueprint for success, enabling you to deliver your message effectively and leave a lasting impression.

Let us go through the three key components of the 10-20-30 Rule in detail.

The 10-Slide Rule

When crafting a winning presentation, Guy Kawasaki’s 10-20-30 Rule sets a clear path for success, with the 10-slide rule as a cornerstone principle. Kawasaki’s insights into the human mind’s capacity to absorb information underscore the importance of brevity and clarity in presentations.

1. Title Slide: The journey begins with a compelling title slide introducing your presentation, featuring essential information such as your name, company details, and contact information.

2. Problem/Opportunity: The second slide delves into the heart of the matter, outlining the problem or opportunity your product or service addresses. This is your chance to spotlight the pain points or unmet needs of your target audience.

3. Value Proposition: Slide three is dedicated to showcasing your offering’s unique value proposition. Showcase the benefits your product or service offers, emphasizing why it stands out in the market.

4. Underlying Magic: On the fourth slide, unveil the magic behind your product or service—the innovative technology or approach that sets you apart from the competition. Keep it concise yet impactful.

5. Business Model: Slide five zooms in on your business model, elucidating how you plan to generate revenue and sustain profitability. This is your opportunity to demonstrate the viability of your venture to potential investors or stakeholders.

6. Go-to-Market Plan: The sixth slide outlines your strategy for bringing your product or service to market. From marketing initiatives to sales tactics, provide a roadmap for achieving your business goals.

7. Competitive Analysis: Slide seven offers insights into your competitive landscape. Analyze rival offerings, sales processes, and marketing strategies, highlighting how your approach positions you for success.

8. Management Team: The eighth slide spotlights your management team, showcasing their expertise, experience, and contributions to your venture’s success. Investors want to know they’re backing a capable and skilled team.

9. Financial Projections and Key Metrics: Slide nine presents a snapshot of your business’s financial outlook, featuring projections, key metrics, and budget plans. This is crucial for demonstrating the potential return on investment.

10. Current Status and Use of Funds: Finally, the tenth slide wraps up your presentation by providing an overview of your current status, accomplishments to date, timeline for future milestones, and how you plan to allocate the funds you seek. It’s your opportunity to leave a lasting impression with a strong call to action .

By adhering to Kawasaki’s 10 concepts rule, presenters can streamline their message, captivate their audience, and effectively drive home their key points. Whether pitching to investors, presenting to stakeholders, or sharing insights with colleagues, this rule is a guiding beacon for impactful presentations.

The 20-Minute Rule

Guy Kawasaki’s 10-20-30 Rule for presentations doesn’t just focus on the number of slides or font size; it also emphasizes the importance of time management, particularly the 20-minute rule. According to Kawasaki, speakers should end a presentation within 20 minutes, as audience attention tends to wane beyond this timeframe.

1. Attention Span: With human attention spans dwindling, Kawasaki stresses the need to keep presentations concise, avoiding fatigue or disengagement from the audience. This rule aligns with research indicating that people tune out after about 10 minutes, making a 20-minute duration optimal to engage your audience .

2. TED Talks Model: The effectiveness of the 20-minute rule is mirrored in popular public speaking formats like TED Talks, where speakers deliver impactful messages within this timeframe. These fast-paced, engaging, and memorable talks prove that brevity doesn’t compromise substance.

3. Structuring Your Talk: Adhering to the 20-minute limit simplifies the planning and structuring process. Presenters can effectively allocate time to each slide or critical point, ensuring all essential information is covered within the allotted timeframe.

4. Audience Engagement: Longer presentations risk losing audience interest and focus. By keeping presentations under 20 minutes, presenters increase the likelihood of audience retention and comprehension.

5. Flexible Time Slots: While presentations may be scheduled for longer durations, sticking to the 20-minute rule allows for flexibility. It leaves ample time for questions, discussions, and unforeseen technical issues, ensuring a smooth and efficient presentation experience.

6. Practical Considerations: Kawasaki acknowledges real-world challenges, such as technical setup time or late arrivals, emphasizing the importance of delivering a succinct pitch within the designated timeframe.

7. Structured Approach: A well-structured 20-minute presentation typically includes a brief introduction, problem statement or question, main body of critical points, and a concise conclusion. This format maximizes impact while respecting audience attention spans.

Adhering to the 20-minute rule enhances presentation effectiveness, keeping audiences engaged and ensuring key messages resonate effectively within a limited timeframe.

The 30-Point Font Rule

Guy Kawasaki’s 10-20-30 Rule emphasizes not just the content of presentations but also their readability, especially with the 30-point font rule. Keeping font sizes at a minimum of 30 points ensures clarity and prevents overcrowding on slides, thus enhancing audience engagement.

1. Clarity Overload: Small fonts on slides can distract and overwhelm audiences, drawing attention away from the presenter. Kawasaki stresses the importance of legibility in focusing on critical points and preventing audiences from reading ahead and disengaging.

2. Key Point Focus: Presenters must distill their content to essential points by enforcing a minimum 30-point font size. This practice prevents information overload and ensures audiences remain attentive and receptive to the speaker’s message.

3. Accessibility Consideration: Larger font sizes benefit individuals with visual impairments, ensuring presentation inclusivity. Kawasaki’s rule aligns with accessibility guidelines, making presentations accessible to a broader audience.

4. Strategic Content Selection: Adhering to the 30-point font rule prompts presenters to prioritize content, selecting only the most critical information for inclusion. This selective approach enhances audience comprehension and retention.

5. Visual Clarity: Larger fonts enhance slide legibility, reducing strain on the audience’s eyes and encouraging active engagement. This approach fosters a smoother presentation flow and facilitates audience understanding.

6. Content Quality: Limiting font size to 30 points or above forces presenters to focus on conveying key messages effectively. This requirement encourages deeper understanding and more impactful content delivery.

7. Engagement Optimization: Font sizes of 30 points or higher keep audiences focused on the speaker rather than struggling to decipher small text. This fosters a more engaging and immersive presentation experience, maximizing audience retention and comprehension.

Adhering to Kawasaki’s 30-point font rule ensures that presentations are clear, concise, and accessible to all audience members. By prioritizing readability and content focus, presenters can deliver more impactful presentations that resonate with their audiences.

Applying The 10-20-30 Rule Beyond VC Presentations

Entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki devised the 10-20-30 Rule drawing from his venture expertise. While initially crafted for business pitches, its adaptability extends beyond the startup world. It’s a winning formula for anyone seeking to sway opinions, whether you’re pitching a product, securing funding, or simply conveying ideas.

The essence of the rule lies in simplicity and clarity. Limit your presentation to 10 slides, each delivered in 20 minutes, with a font size of no less than 30 points. This structure ensures focus, conciseness, and audience engagement.

This approach isn’t exclusive to business endeavors. Teachers, students, or professionals from any field can benefit. Suppose you’re a teacher discussing mindfulness in class. Embrace Kawasaki’s methodology by condensing your lecture into ten slides. While the initial slides might address your audience’s needs and your proposed solution, the subsequent ones should delve into the benefits of meditation. The final slides could encapsulate key takeaways and urge action tailored to your audience’s needs.

Moreover, leveraging PowerPoint templates streamlines the process, allowing you to concentrate on content delivery. Adhering to the 10-20-30 principle ensures your message remains focused and impactful, regardless of your presentation’s objective.

Wrap-Up: The 10 slides, 20 minutes and 30 Point Font Rule for Presentations

In the world of presentations, the 10-20-30 Rule is a beacon of guidance for marketers and presenters alike. Simplified for success, this rule packs a punch with its straightforward approach: 10 slides, 20 minutes, and a font size of 30 points. You’re poised to make a lasting impact by condensing your content into these parameters when you make your presentation.

First, limiting yourself to 10 slides forces you to distill your message to its core, highlighting only the most crucial points. This ensures that your audience stays focused on what truly matters.

The 20-minute timeframe keeps you on track and encourages you to deliver your message concisely and effectively. There is no room for rambling or unnecessary details here; every minute counts.

Lastly, the 30-point font size is a visual cue, reminding you to keep your slides clean and concise. Large fonts discourage cluttered slides and encourage you to focus on key takeaways, not wordy explanations.

Remember, while the 10-20-30 Rule may have its roots in marketing, its principles can be applied across various contexts. Whether you’re a student, entrepreneur, or professional, mastering this rule equips you with the tools to engage your audience and drive your point home with clarity and impact.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

1. What is the 10-20-30 Rule for presentations?

The 10-20-30 Rule, popularized by Guy Kawasaki, is a guideline for crafting impactful presentations. It suggests limiting your presentation to 10 slides, keeping it within 20 minutes, and using a font size of at least 30 points. This rule aims to ensure brevity, clarity, and audience engagement.

2. Why is the 10-20-30 Rule important?

The rule emphasizes concise communication, respecting audience attention spans, and enhancing readability. By following this guideline, presenters can deliver focused, memorable presentations that effectively convey their message and captivate their audience.

3. How can I apply the 10-20-30 Rule to my presentations?

To apply the rule:

(a) Start by selecting essential points and condensing them into ten slides.

(b) Aim to deliver your presentation within a 20-minute timeframe, focusing on clarity and avoiding unnecessary details.

(c) Ensure your slides have a minimum font size of 30 points for optimal readability.

4. Can the 10-20-30 Rule be adapted for different types of presentations?

The rule’s principles can be adapted for various presentation contexts, including business pitches, academic lectures, or casual talks. Whether pitching a product, delivering a report, or teaching a class, adhering to the 10-20-30 Rule can help you streamline your message and engage your audience effectively.

Master Stellar Presentations with Prezentium’s 10-20-30 Rule Implementation

Transform your presentations with Prezentium ‘s expert services tailored to Guy Kawasaki’s 10-20-30 Rule. Say goodbye to long, tedious presentations that leave your audience snoozing or scrolling through their phones. Our overnight presentation service ensures you receive a stellar, concise presentation in your inbox by the next business day, adhering to Kawasaki’s guidelines for brevity and clarity.

Our team of presentation specialists will help you craft engaging slides, transforming your ideas into exquisite presentation designs while following the 10-slide rule. Whether you pitch a business idea or deliver a report, our experts will ensure your message is conveyed effectively within 20 minutes, keeping your audience engaged and focused.

Additionally, our Zenith Learning workshops combine structured problem-solving with visual storytelling, empowering you to master the art of presentations using the 10-20-30 Rule. Join us in reshaping how you approach presentations and leave a lasting impression on your audience. Let Prezentium be your partner in crafting captivating presentations that resonate with clarity and impact.

Why wait? Avail a complimentary 1-on-1 session with our presentation expert. See how other enterprise leaders are creating impactful presentations with us.

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Everything You Need To Know About 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint Presentations

Would you like to deliver a perfect presentation? Who wouldn’t! Here is an overview of the 10/20/30 Rule for making your presentations polished and perfect.

February 9, 2024

What's Inside?

What does the best presentation look like? We may not have an answer for that, but we have a clear answer for how a bad presentation looks. Think about a presentation that goes for over 30 minutes, goes over 15 slides, and is still counting, and the speaker reads texts on the slides. Is there anyone even still listening? Most of the audience fell asleep, looking at their phone or daydreaming at this point. 

So, what was wrong with this presentation? What should the speaker do for their next presentation? Here is the 10/20/30 Rule! This rule will be your guideline to avoid horrible presentations. 

We prepared a comprehensive guide to create and deliver effective presentations by using the 10/20/30 Rule! If you want information about the 10/20/30 Rule, how to apply it to your presentation, its benefits and downsides, and some helpful tips from us for your next presentation, keep reading! 

Presentations in Our Life

Presentations are a ubiquitous part of our lives. In many settings, we can be asked to give presentations, convey information, share ideas, persuade others, or, as a recent trend, just for fun! In school, work, or maybe in your daily life, in a PowerPoint party , you may be asked to give presentations. 

What to Consider While Preparing a PowerPoint Presentation?

• Topic and Purpose
• Organization of the Slides
• Design of the Slides
• Delivery Style

You should choose your topic carefully. After choosing your topic, it is important to clearly describe your purpose for giving this presentation. Are you informing, persuading, inspiring, or entertaining? Knowing your purpose will shape your content and approach. Thus, it will create a roadmap for you to follow.

You should organize your slides. Of course, the title is the first slide, but what else comes after? You should outline your topic and organize your slides accordingly. The slides should keep up with the flow of the presentation and support the presenter.

Your slides shouldn't be dull. The slides should contain attention-grabbing designs. Otherwise, you may subject your audience to Death by PowerPoint. In other words, you will bore them to death with your presentation .

There should be a set time limit for delivery. The last thing you want in a presentation is to run around in circles and repeat. You should try to keep it as short as possible, of course keeping in mind the goal for your delivery. Remember that people's attention span is limited. Thus, giving a longer presentation than it should be is never a good idea. The last thing you want is for the audience to stop listening to you.

Your delivery is the most important part of the presentation. You may spend hours on your presentation design, but in the end, you are the one who will present it. Be sure to practice beforehand. Prepare your presentation according to the time limit and focus on your pronunciation. Practice for a smooth delivery. Try to be natural and confident when presenting!

Although you should consider these points for your presentation, you can also apply the 10/20/30 rule for your presentation. This rule almost covers all the main points of a presentation to be perfect! Capture your audience and deliver your point flawlessly!

What is the 10/20/30 Rule?  

  The 10/20/30 Rule refers to a presentation formula for the best and most effective presentations. This rule provides a valuable framework, emphasizing the importance of organization, time management, and legible text. According to this formula:

• You should have 10 slides
• The presentation should last 20 minutes
• The slides should have at least a 30-point font

10/20/30 Rule

The 10/20/30 rule was coined by Guy Kawasaki , who is one of the early pioneers of Silicon Valley, now working as the chief evangelist of Canva . Back in 2006, Kawasaki was working as a venture specialist. After seeing enough presentations, which was a lot, he was able to analyze what makes a presentation better or worse than others. That’s when the 10/20/30 rule was born!

Here is Guy Kawasaki explaining the 10/20/30 Rule in a minute:

Who can use the 10/20/30 Rule in the Slides?

Kawasaki created this formula based on his experiences as a venture specialist. Therefore, this formula can be used for marketers. Presentations are different from advertisements . Presentations should be visually engaging, informative, and supportive of the presenter in times of need. 

The 10/20/30 rule idea can be used for any presentation made with the purpose of reaching an agreement: a pitch deck , making a sale , raising capital, and so on. 

However, if you have other aims for your presentation, you can still take the key points for your presentation. It is important to understand that this rule focuses on the structure of a presentation. This includes the organization of the presentation, time limit, and design of your presentation. Whether you are a student , teacher , or worker, you can consider using the 10/20/30 rule for your presentations.

10/ 20/ 30 Rule for Your PowerPoint Presentation

10 slides is more than enough.

No more than 10 slides! As Kawasaki points out, the human mind is only able to comprehend 10 concepts in a meeting. If you have more than 10 slides, some of them are bound to be forgotten. Some may be forgotten before you even finish your presentation. It is important to use your slides as supporters and add key points only. You should prepare your topic and slides accordingly. 

Actually, Kawasaki also shared an outline to follow on a marketing presentation. By following this outline, you can deliver every important detail in your marketing presentation.

a. This slide should include your name, company name, contact information, and other information needed.

2. Problem/Opportunity

a. In this slide, you can explain the problem in the market and your solution to this problem. You should be able to explain what needs your product or service addresses and how.

3. Value Proposition

a. You should highlight the values and benefits of your product for the customers in this slide.

4. Underlying Magic

a. In this slide, explain the technology behind your business model. Depending on your product or service, you can keep this part shorter or longer. 

5. Business Model

a. Explain your plan to generate revenue and profit. After all, you are looking for an investment or agreement, so you should highlight this part! 

6. Go-to-Market Plan

a. In this part, explain your market or sales plan. You can show a roadmap for revenue goals, target customers, activities to achieve your goals, and some problems you may experience.

7. Competitive Analysis

a. In this slide, present your strategy that involves examining and analyzing your rivals in the market. In this way, you learn about their offerings, sales processes, and marketing strategies. In addition, add your stronger corporate strategies to gain market share.

8. Management Team

a. Highlight your team and their work! You may want to focus on your management team’s experience, skills, effectiveness, and knowledge of the product. 

9. Financial Projections and Key Metrics

a. Provide a set of financial statements for your business idea. Your future revenues and expenses should be presented in an estimated timeline. Present a budget plan! 

10. Current Status, Accomplishments to Date, Timeline, and Use of Funds.

a. In the last slide, you should talk about the current progress or developments in your business, achievements that you accomplished, a timeline for your future achievements, and how you plan to use the investments that you seek. 

While the 10/20/30 Rule provides a structured framework, you may want to adapt some parts of the outline for your presentation according to your topic. But in the end, it is more ideal that your outline should be similar to Kawasaki’s. 

20 Minutes is Ideal For Your Delivery

No longer than 20 minutes! People have a very short attention span; this includes your audience, too! Even if everything else in your presentation is perfect, a longer presentation will tire your audience, like a class that is longer than it should be. The longer your presentation gets, the more your audience will get distracted, tired, or bored. Similarly, you will become tired, too. That will make you more prone to make mistakes and repeat yourself.

Most TED Talks are 20 minutes or less, mostly around 10-ish minutes. This shows that you can get your point across effectively in 20 minutes, so don’t hesitate! It may seem short, but because they are fast-paced, they become more engaging. The important part is to get your point across and make your audience understand you!

You may be given more time to present. However, you should still keep your presentation to 20 minutes and leave your remaining time for questions, discussions, and comments. This will also prepare you for any hiccups out of your control. For example, people can arrive late, and there may be problems with the computer and projector. Because of these problems, some of your designated time can stolen. Even if you are given an hour, keeping your presentation 20 minutes will give you an advantage.   

30 Point Font is Better

No smaller than a 30-point font! Font rule is a very important part of the 10/20/30 Rule. Your presentation shouldn't have any small text. If you have texts that are usually in 10-point fonts, then you probably have chunks of text in your slides and will read from them during the presentation. As most of us have experienced, those presentations are very hard to listen to! After all, the audience can read faster than you speak. Therefore, the audience is ahead of you, and after they read, there is no need to listen to you. 

The purpose of 30-points is this: because it is a large font size, you won't be able to fit all the information you want to deliver. Only key points and main ideas will be in your presentation! As it should be! You can add key points and get support from your slides when needed.

Also, a smaller font means that it will be harder to read for your audience. So, rather than being supporting material, it captures your audience as they try to read the small fonts. What's ideal is for the audience to listen and pay attention to you and maybe take a quick glance at the presentation.

If you think it is a too strict rule, Kawasaki also proposes another idea. If you can, find the age of the oldest people in the audience. By dividing it into two, you will have your ideal font size. For example, if the oldest person in your audience is 50, then your font can be 25 points! 

It is up to you to choose your font size. However, we recommend 30 points!

Why Should Apply Kawasaki’s Rule or Not?

As with everything, there are ups and downs to using this formula for your presentations. Consider these for your presentation to decide whether to use the 10/20/30 rule. Keep in mind that some benefits can outweigh downsides and vice versa. You can analyze it according to your own audience and the context of your presentation.

The Benefits of Kawasaki’s Rule: 

There is an apparent structure Kawasaki’s Rule provides. With years of use, this formula has proven to be accurate and useful. The rule is specially designed for marketers, so the structure fits perfectly into a marketer's presentation. However, everyone can adapt the 10/20/30 rule for their presentation, as it focuses on the structure of the presentation.

Focused Presentation: 

With 10 slides and 20 minutes, 10/20/30 makes your presentation more concise and focused. A concise presentation shows your mastery of the topic. There is more virtue in getting your point across with fewer words rather than talking for hours. The aim is to give your information in a shorter way to make your content easier to understand. Also, it will be easier for your audience to remember what was said in the presentation afterward.

Response to Your Audience’s Needs:

10/20/30 is prepared by Kawasaki from his experiences as an audience. Thus, it is no surprise that the rule focuses on the audience's perspective more. With this audience-centered approach, keeping it shorter makes your audience more engaged. It is also easier to remember a short presentation afterward. 

The Downsides of Kawasaki’s Rule: 

Remember that this presentation rule was from the 2000s. So, some problems are addressing issues that are out of date.

Time Management Problems:  

Kawasaki points out that 20 minutes is enough for a presentation. However, sometimes it may not be. The 10 slides Kawasaki proposes can take longer than 20 minutes, and this is highly likely. So, for the sake of keeping up with the time limit and being brief, some valuable information can be missed. 

Furthermore, Kawasaki advises that even if an hour is given, the presentation still should be 20 minutes, and the rest should be left for the audience's questions. But trusting the audience's questions is always risky. What if there are no questions? Your presentation will be short and brief. 

Advanced Technology: 

We now use more high-definition projectors that are able to show smaller texts in better quality. In addition, presentation platforms have become more online. In a video-conference, a 30-point font size is unnecessary and not visually satisfying. Also, a 30-point font does not leave much space for a creative and unique design for your slides.

Some Tips For Your Next Slide

Technology and tools:.

Stay updated with the latest presentation tools and technologies, like Decktopus. Decktopus is a modern presentation tool that offers a range of features for creating visually appealing and engaging slides with the help of AI. Decktopus is easy to use and quick to create slides you want to show in your next marketing presentation. With Decktopus, it is impossible for your slides to not take the attention of your audience.

Having visually appealing and supporting slides is important! You may capture the audience with your speech, but you also should capture them visually! Use creative templates, designs, and graphics! You can easily create decks with various templates and visuals on Decktopus! Take a look !

Storytelling:

Storytelling is an art and a dynamic tool for presentations! By sharing your story, you can make your presentation more memorable and engaging. You may want to create compelling narratives that draw in your audience and make them resonate on an emotional level. Storytelling makes you and your product more relatable for the audience. The audience becomes invested in your story and begins to care about you and your product.

Body Language and Delivery:

As we said, delivery is the key part of a presentation! Your body language gives underlying messages about your confidence and expertise. Practice non-verbal communication before your presentation. You may practice in front of a group of friends to get their advice! Don’t forget the most important ones: maintain eye contact, use gestures effectively, and project confidence!

Handling Questions:

Think about possible questions and your answers before your presentation! You may develop a few strategies for handling questions and addressing unexpected challenges during your presentation. Familiarize yourself with possible questions and objections against your claims, and come up with well-thought-out answers before your presentation. It is important to answer all the questions asked to show your expertise and mastery of the subject. You may conduct a Q&A session after your presentation, or you can take questions during the presentation, depending on the flow of your presentation.

Make It More Interactive:

Creating an interactive presentation will certainly increase your audience engagement and make your presentation more memorable. You may want to get your audience’s attention by adding their input to the presentation. For example, you can conduct a live question and answer session during your presentation and add the input of your audience to the narrative. Similarly, you can create a spontaneous survey or poll, to make your presentation more engaging. You can use some tools in your slides or simply ask people to raise their hands. Remember that most of the TED Talks start with a question!

By incorporating these additional ideas into your presentation, you can create and deliver effective presentations not only in marketing but in various contexts and settings!

How to Start?

Try Decktopus for creating your next presentation. You can follow the 10/20/30 Rule easily with customized slides! 

Decktopus is a presentation assistant that helps you create presentations. Once you answer enough questions about your slideshow, it can also build decks for you. After you answer the questions about your audience, how long your presentation will take, what your presentation is about, your aim, and your template, Decktopus will create a deck for you with images, titles, logos, writings, etc. Because you’ve given detailed information about what you want to present, you don’t have to change many things.

For your practice, you can use Rehearsal Mode in Decktopus ! You can rehearse and adjust the time for your presentation. You can still make changes that are needed after your practice!

In addition, Decktopus has many templates ! These will make your presentation more visually engaging and look more professional. As with the concept, let’s say you will make a presentation about marketing. Decktopus has over 15 marketing presentation templates! You can choose any template that goes with your concept or product!

Decktopus has you covered for your next presentation! If you want more information about how it is used, you can look at this video: 

In the fast-paced world we live in, effective presentations have become a vital skill. Whether you're a student, teacher, entrepreneur, or professional, the ability to convey your ideas clearly and persuasively can open doors and drive success. 10/20/30 Rule by Guy Kawasaki, born out of years of experience, offers a structured approach to crafting presentations that capture your audience's attention and deliver your message.

Effective presentations are not just about slides and bullet points; they are about your audience, sparking their interest and leaving a lasting impact. While presenting, storytelling, visuals, slides, engagement, and confidence are equally critical components you should consider.

So, for your next presentation journey, keep Guy Kawasaki's 10/20/30 Rule in mind. With practice, preparation, and a deep understanding of your content, you'll be well on your way to delivering presentations that inform, inspire, and engage.

In the end, presentations are not just about the slides; they're about the connections you build, the ideas you share, and the impact you make. Whether you're giving a sales pitch , a classroom lecture, or a TED Talk, the art of presenting is a skill that can empower you to achieve your goals and leave a lasting impression. 

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What Is the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint?

Published: November 12, 2020

Despite how many PowerPoint presentations I’ve given in my life, I’ve always struggled with understanding the best practices for creating them. I know they need to look nice, but figuring out how to make them aesthetically pleasing and informative is tough. 

I’m sure my experience isn’t unique, as finding the correct balance between content, design, and timing can be difficult. Marketers know this more than anyone, as success in the role is often marked by being able to create engaging campaigns that tell a story and inspire audiences to take a specific action, like purchasing a product. 

However, PowerPoint presentations are different from advertisements. Understanding how to leverage your marketing knowledge when creating PowerPoints can be tricky. Still, there are various resources for marketers to use when creating presentations, one of which is the 10/20/30 rule. 

What is the 10/20/30 rule of PowerPoint?

The 10/20/30 rule of PowerPoint is a straightforward concept: no PowerPoint presentation should be more than ten slides, longer than 20 minutes, and use fonts smaller than 30 point size. 

Coined by Guy Kawasaki, the rule is a tool for marketers to create excellent PowerPoint presentations. Each element of the formula helps marketers find a balance between design and conceptual explanations, so you can capture audience attention, emphasize your points, and enhance readability. 

Guy Kawasaki PowerPoint

Guy Kawasaki , one of the early Apple employees, championed the concept of a ‘brand evangelist’ to describe his position. He spent most of his time working to generate a follower base for Macintosh, the family of Apple computers. Today he works as a brand evangelist for Canva, an online graphic design tool. 

Given that he’s had significant experience giving presentations to captivate audiences, he’s figured out that the 10/20/30 is a successful formula to follow. Kawasaki’s book, Art of The Start , is where he first introduced the concept and described how it works.

Let’s cover each part of the rule in more detail. 

Kawasaki believes that it’s challenging for audiences to comprehend more than ten concepts during a presentation. Given this, marketers should aim to create PowerPoints with no more than ten slides, i.e., ten ideas you’ll explain. Using fewer slides and focusing on the critical elements helps your audience grasp the concepts you’re sharing with them. 

In practice, this means creating slides that are specific and straight to the point. For example, say you’re presenting on the success of your recent campaign. Your marketing strategy was likely extensive, and you took a series of different actions to obtain your end result. Instead of outlining every aspect of your campaign, you would use your slides to outline its main elements of your strategy. This could look like individual slides for summarizing the problem you hoped to solve, your goals, the steps you took to reach your goals, and post-campaign analytics data that summarizes your accomplishments. 

It’s important to note that there shouldn’t be overwhelming amounts of text on your slides. You want them to be concise. Your audience should get most of the information from the words you’re speaking; your slides should be more supplemental than explanatory. 

After you’ve spent time coming up with your ten key points, you’ll need to present them in 20 minutes. Knowing that you’ll only have 20 minutes also makes it easier to plan and structure your talk, as you’ll know how much time to dedicate to each slide, so you address all relevant points.

Kawasaki acknowledges that presentation time slots can often be longer, but finishing at the 20-minute mark leaves time for valuable discussion and Q&A. Saving time in your presentation also leaves space for technical difficulties. 

30 Point Font

If you’ve been in the audience during a presentation, you probably know that slides with small font can be challenging to read and take your attention away from the speaker. 

Kawasaki’s final rule is that no font within your presentation should be smaller than 30 point size. If you’ve already followed the previous rules, then you should be able to display your key points on your slides in a large enough font that users can read. Since your key points are short and focused, there won’t be a lot of text for your audience to read, and they’ll spend more time listening to you speak. 

Given that the average recommended font size for accessibility is 16, using a 30-point font ensures that all members of your audience can read and interact with your slides. 

Make Your Presentations More Engaging

The 10/20/30 rule of PowerPoint is meant to help marketers create powerful presentations. 

Each element of the rule works in tandem with the other: limiting yourself to 10 slides requires you to select the most salient points to present to your audience. A 20-minute timeline helps you ensure that you’re contextualizing those slides as you speak, without delving into unnecessary information. Using a 30-point font can act as a final check for your presentation, as it emphasizes the importance of only displaying key points on your slides, rather than huge blocks of text. Font size then circles back around to the ten slides, as you’ll craft sentences from your key points that will fit on your slides in 30-point font. 

Being mindful of slide count, text size, and presentation length ensures that your audiences are captivated by your words as you explain the value behind your work. 

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What Is The 10/20/30 Rule For Presentations And Why It's Important For Your Team

Presentations are the glue of team workflow, from internal updates to client pitches. Yet, without clear guidelines, collaborative efforts can turn into design chaos. Beautiful.ai’s Team plan streamlines this with robust content management and branding controls, ensuring your decks stay polished and professional. But sometimes, teams need more than just tools—they need rules. Enter Guy Kawasaki’s 10/20/30 rule for slideshows.

What is the 10/20/30 rule for slideshows?

Silicon Valley guru Guy Kawasaki coined the 10/20/30 rule to banish boring presentations. This simple, powerful guideline dictates: ten slides, twenty minutes, and no font smaller than thirty points. With Kawasaki’s expertise as a venture capitalist and evangelist, he’s seen his share of dreadful pitches and knows how to keep an audience engaged.

Stick to the 10/20/30 rule, and you’ll transform your presentations from snooze-fests to showstoppers.

What is the 10/20/30 rule for presentations and why is it important?

Guy Kawasaki, a Silicon-Valley based author, speaker, entrepreneur, and evangelist, coined this presentation rule. Kawasaki suffers from Ménière’s disease which results in occasional hearing loss, tinnitus (a constant ringing sound), and vertigo—something that he suspects can be triggered by boring presentations (among other medically-proven things). While he may have been kidding about presentations affecting his Ménière’s, it inspired him to end snooze-worthy pitches once and for all. As a venture capitalist, he’s no stranger to entrepreneurship, pitches, and everything in between. We’d be willing to bet that he’s heard his fair share of pitches that have fallen on deaf ears (almost literally, in his case). 

To save the venture capital community from death-by-PowerPoint, he evangelized the 10/20/30 rule for presentations which states that “a presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points.” 

We’re all passionate about our stories and hope our audience shares that enthusiasm. But even the most groundbreaking topics can lose people to distractions or boredom. 

The 10/20/30 rule for presentations ensures your slides are concise, legible, and memorable, driving bigger wins for your team.

Let’s break down each of these presentation rules:

Less is more. Kawasaki’s rule emphasizes this beautifully. 

Audiences can’t digest more than 10 concepts in one sitting. Each slide should highlight a key takeaway, clarifying what you want your audience to learn. Whether it’s a pitch, internal meeting, or sales deck, sticking to 10 slides keeps your message focused and impactful.

While Kawasaki applied this to the venture capitalist world—and the 10 slides you absolutely need in your pitch —this is a good rule of thumb for internal meetings, proposals, and sales decks, too. 

Remember the last 90-minute presentation you actually remembered? Exactly. Attention spans are short, and it's not personal—it’s human nature. 

Aim to deliver your presentation in 20 minutes or less. This keeps your audience engaged and leaves room for discussion, questions, and driving your points home. Regardless of the time you have blocked out for the meeting, your team should aim to keep their presentation short. If there’s time left over, use that for discussion to answer questions and drive your point home. 

30 Point Font

If your audience has to strain their eyes to read your slides, they probably won’t bother to read them at all. Regardless of the age of your audience, no one wants to squint their way through a 20-minute presentation. Kawasaki’s rule of thumb is to keep all text to 30 point font or bigger. Of course, the bigger the font, the less text you’ll be able to fit. This is a good exercise to decide what information you really need on the slide, and what you can do without. By making your slides more legible for your audience, you’re encouraging them to follow along. Additionally, being intentional about what your team includes on each slide helps the audience know exactly what you want them to pay attention to in the presentation. 

Kawasaki’s 10/20/30 rule transforms presentations from tedious to terrific. Embrace it, and watch your team’s presentations shine.

Real world impact

Imagine you’re pitching a groundbreaking product to potential investors. With only ten slides, you cut the fluff and deliver a powerful, focused message. In twenty minutes, you keep their attention, leaving them eager to learn more. Your slides, with 30-point font, are clear and impactful, ensuring no one misses your key points. 

Or consider a team meeting where you’re presenting quarterly results . By adhering to the 10/20/30 rule, your colleagues stay engaged, and the concise format makes your data memorable and actionable. 

Even in a sales pitch, the rule ensures you highlight the most compelling benefits without overwhelming your prospects. Across all these scenarios, the 10/20/30 rule transforms ordinary presentations into compelling narratives that drive results.

Applying the 10/20/30 presentation rule in Beautiful.ai 

Now that you know Guy Kawasaki’s 10/20/30 rule, let’s apply it to your next team presentation. 

In Beautiful.ai, our pre-built presentation templates make it easy for you to stay inspired. Simply browse our inspiration gallery, curated by industry experts, pick the template that speaks to you, and customize it with your own content. Most of our deck templates are well within the 10 slide standard, so you’ll be on the right track (the Kawasaki way).  

Once you’re in the deck, our Smart Slides handle the nitty gritty design work so you don’t have to. Changing the font size is easy, and our design AI will let you know if the size is too big or too long for the space on the slide. You can choose your favorite (legible) font when customizing your presentation theme, and that font will be applied to each slide throughout the deck for a cohesive and consistent look. 

Of course, it’s all for naught if you don’t practice. We recommend doing a few dry runs in the mirror, or in front of your dog, to get the timing of your presentation right. Remember, 20 minutes is the magic number here.

Jordan Turner

Jordan is a Bay Area writer, social media manager, and content strategist.

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5 golden rules of PowerPoint design

april 30, 2024

by Deb Ashby

Wondering how to design the perfect PowerPoint presentation? It's easier than you think–just follow five simple rules to get started:

1. Consider using templates

When building a slide deck, it’s important to maintain consistency throughout. We want to ensure we are using consistent font styles, colors and themes. This can be tricky when designing from scratch, so why not start from a template?

Microsoft Create contains hundreds of pre-made, customizable PowerPoint templates, which means you don’t have to start from scratch and the fonts and colors are already set for you.

Simply choose a template from the gallery, customize it as needed, and you are done!

2. No walls of text

We’ve all seen PowerPoint presentations where slides contain too much text. The human brain struggles to listen and read at the same time. If you are presenting to an audience, keep the text on slides to a minimum.

Consider employing the “5-5-5" rule. No more than 5 lines, no more than 5 words, no more than 5 minutes. Think short and sharp memory joggers instead of rambling paragraphs.

Where possible, consider replacing text with visuals to represent your point. People remember images more than words.

3. Be mindful of colors and fonts

No one wants their audience to leave with a headache after an hour of straining to read slides. We need to ensure that our presentation is easy to read for everyone – even for those in the nosebleed seats at the back! Think about the font you are using. Is it appropriate for the presentation? What about the font size? Can people at the back easily read? What about people with visual impairment? Ensure all text is at least 24pts.

When it comes to color, ensure all slides have good contrast. Dark backgrounds should have light font and vice versa.

4. Use animation sparingly

Animation can really liven up an otherwise flat presentation. However, it should be used thoughtfully and sparingly. Too much of the wrong type of animation with objects flying in and zooming around the screen, while fun, can look confusing and unprofessional.

Animation should be subtle (especially for pitch decks and other formal presentations). With every animation you add, ask yourself, "Is this going to enhance my presentation or distract from it?"

5. Engage your audience

When presenting to an audience, there is usually an awkward time before the presentation begins while the speaker waits for everyone to arrive. During this time, people may start scrolling on their phones or get distracted with work emails, and it can be hard to pull the audience back.

To avoid this issue, work to grab your audience's attention before the presentation even starts. Instead of just having the title slide on the screen, consider creating "kiosk slides." These are a series of slides that contain a combination of interesting things for the audience to look at or engage with. Maybe you have an interesting image? A funny quote or fun facts? Or maybe there is a question you want them to think about prior to the session?

Create these slides and have them automatically cycle round before the presentation starts.

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The Essential 5 Rules of Effective PowerPoint Presentations

PowerPoint presentations have become a cornerstone of modern communication, whether in the boardroom, the classroom, or the conference hall. When PowerPoint is used effectively, it can elevate your message, making your message engaging, clear, and memorable. There are 5 simple rules to follow to ensure your presentation doesn’t become a dreaded “death by PowerPoint” experience. In this blog, we’ll quickly explore these five essential rules of creating compelling and impactful PowerPoint presentations.

Rule 1: Keep It Simple

One of the cardinal sins in PowerPoint presentations is overcrowding your slides with text, bullet points, and too many visuals. The first rule is to keep it simple. Each slide should have a single, clear message. Use concise language, bullet points, and minimal text to convey your points. Visuals should be clean and uncluttered. Simplicity enhances comprehension and retention.

Rule 2: Visualize Your Data

Data is a critical element in many presentations, but raw numbers can be overwhelming. Rule number two is to visualize your data. Use charts, graphs, and diagrams to represent your data in a visually engaging way. Choose the right type of visualization for your information, ensuring it’s easy to understand at a glance. Well-crafted visuals make your data more accessible and memorable.

Rule 3: Tell a Story

The most compelling presentations are those that tell a story. Rule three is all about storytelling. Structure your presentation like a narrative with a clear beginning, middle, and end. Start with an attention-grabbing introduction, build your narrative with supporting points, and conclude with a memorable takeaway or call to action. A well-structured story captivates your audience and helps them connect with your message.

Rule 4: Design Matters

Effective design is crucial to a successful PowerPoint presentation. Rule four is all about design. Choose a consistent, visually appealing template. Use fonts, colors, and imagery that align with your message and branding. Ensure that text is legible and that visuals are high-quality and relevant. Good design enhances professionalism and keeps your audience engaged.

Rule 5: Practice and Rehearse

No matter how well your slides are designed, the delivery is equally important. Rule five emphasizes practice and rehearsal. Familiarize yourself with the content, so you can present confidently and naturally. Rehearse your timing, transitions, and any interactive elements. Anticipate questions and prepare for them. Practice helps you connect with your audience and come across as a confident, knowledgeable speaker.

Mastering the art of PowerPoint presentations requires following these five fundamental rules: simplicity, data visualization, storytelling, design, and practice. These rules can transform your presentations from dull and forgettable to compelling and impactful. By keeping your slides clear and uncluttered, visually representing data, weaving a narrative, paying attention to design, and practicing your delivery, you can create presentations that inform, engage, and leave a lasting impression on your audience. The next time you create a PowerPoint presentation, remember these rules to ensure your message shines.

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• Presentation Design

10 Simple Rules for Crafting Effective Presentation Slides

Introduction.

In today’s fast-paced world, effective communication is crucial, and one powerful tool for communication is the presentation slide. Whether you’re pitching a new idea, delivering a sales pitch, or sharing important information, a well-crafted slide can make all the difference. At Slide Marvels , we understand the power of presentation slides, and we’re here to share our top ten simple rules for creating slides that captivate, engage, and inspire your audience.

Rule 1: Keep It Simple

The cardinal rule of effective presentation slides is to keep them simple. Avoid cluttering your slides with excessive text or visuals. Instead, focus on conveying your message concisely and clearly. Use bullet points, short sentences, and impactful visuals to get your point across without overwhelming your audience.

Rule 2: Use High-Quality Visuals

Visuals can enhance the effectiveness of your presentation slides, but only if they’re high-quality and relevant. Choose images, charts, and graphs that are clear, crisp, and directly support your message. Avoid using low-resolution images or unnecessary graphics that distract from your content.

Rule 3: Stick to a Consistent Design

Consistency is key to creating professional-looking presentation slides. Choose a cohesive color scheme, font, and layout and stick to it throughout your presentation. Consistent design not only improves the visual appeal of your slides but also helps reinforce your brand identity and message.

Rule 4: Limit Text

Long paragraphs of text have no place on presentation slides. Instead, aim to convey your key points using brief, succinct phrases or bullet points. Your slides should serve as visual aids to complement your spoken words, not replace them.

Rule 5: Use White Space Effectively

White space or negative space is the space around elements on your slide. Embracing white space can improve readability and focus your audience’s attention on the most important parts of your content. Avoid overcrowding your slides and allow each element to breathe.

Rule 6: Tell a Story

Effective presentation slides should tell a story that resonates with your audience. Structure your slides in a logical sequence that builds suspense, delivers key points, and concludes with a strong call to action. Use storytelling techniques such as anecdotes, examples, and metaphors to engage your audience on an emotional level.

Rule 7: Practice Visual Hierarchy

Visual hierarchy refers to the arrangement of elements on your slides to guide your audience’s attention. Use size, color, and positioning to emphasize important points and lead your audience through your content in a natural flow. By prioritizing information visually, you can ensure that your message is conveyed clearly and effectively.

Rule 8: Keep Animations Subtle

While animations can add interest and dynamism to your presentation slides, they should be used sparingly and with purpose. Avoid flashy or distracting animations that detract from your message. Instead, opt for subtle transitions and animations that enhance the overall cohesion and professionalism of your presentation.

Rule 9: Practice Rehearsal

No matter how well-designed your slides are, effective presentation delivery requires practice and rehearsal. Familiarize yourself with your content, timing, and delivery to ensure a smooth and confident presentation. Rehearse your presentation multiple times to iron out any kinks and refine your delivery for maximum impact.

Rule 10: Engage with Your Audience

Finally, remember that effective presentations are not one-sided lectures but interactive experiences. Engage with your audience by inviting questions, encouraging discussion, and soliciting feedback. By fostering a dialogue with your audience, you can create a memorable and impactful presentation experience.

Creating effective presentation slides is both an art and a science, but by following these ten simple rules, you can elevate your slides from ordinary to extraordinary. At Slide Marvels, we’re passionate about helping our clients communicate their ideas with clarity, creativity, and impact. Contact us [email protected] today to discover how we can help you unlock the full potential of your presentations.

Connect with Us:  LinkedIn –  slidemarvels  | Twitter –  SlideMarvels  | Instagram –  slidemarvels

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• Presentations
• Presentation Techniques

Rules of PowerPoint (Rule of 3 and More)

Do you want to give the best presentation? Have you ever created a presentation and thought it could be better but don’t know how to make it better? You can follow PowerPoint rules to make your presentation look better.

One of these rules is the rule of three. In this article, we’ll cover the rule of three and other PowerPoint rules to help you create better presentations.

Jump to content in this section:

What Is the Rule of Three?

How to use the rule of three in your presentation, more powerpoint rules.

Before we cover how to use the rule of three in your PowerPoint presentation, we need to answer the questions: what is the rule of three?  

This writing principle says people understand concepts, situations, and ideas in three groups. This rule can work for sentences, situations, or stories.

We are used to things coming in threes. Many phrases come in threes such as:

• blood, sweat, and tears
• stop, drop, and roll

Since it’s so common, our brain remembers things that come in three more easily because it's expected.

Now we’ve answered the question, what is the rule of 3? Let’s look at how to use it in PowerPoint presentations.

The presentation that will be used throughout this article is the Minimal Presentation PowerPoint Template from Envato Elements.

This premium template comes with over 300 total slides. It also comes with ten color scheme options that you can choose from.

If you want to add some visual interest to your presentation, this template makes it easy through its picture placeholders and 4000 vector icons that come with it.

The rule of three can be used to make your presentation more memorable and stand out. This is how you use the rule of three in your presentation, along with some rule of three examples.

1. Divide Your Presentation

When making a presentation that uses the rule of three, you need to divide your presentation into three parts. The parts are usually the beginning, middle, and end.

Two other ways you can divide your presentation are:

• opportunity, solution, benefit
• problem, solution, action

Your whole presentation should be structured around the number three. This means that you should have three main points in your presentation.

For example, three main points of a presentation could be:

• dogs, cats, and hamsters

Another example would be if your presentation were about the environment. You could divide it into three parts:

• identification
• conservation.

2. Use Bullet Points

According to the rule of three, you should only use three bullet points to support your points.

Three points are easier to remember. When you have three bullet points, your presentation looks full without looking overwhelmingly full.

3. Use Catchy Phrases

If you use catchy phrases, you should follow the rule of three to make those phrases more memorable.

You can use the rule of three in two ways.

• You can have a catchy phrase with three words, such as “lights, camera, action.” 
• You can also use a phrase with three words like this quote from Plato: “There are three classes of men: lovers of wisdom, lovers of honor, and lovers of gain.”

4. Use Visual Images

Every good presentation has visuals, but how do you use the rule of three with your visuals?

It's simple. If you use icons, you should only use three. If you use images, follow the rule of three.

You can also use a single image containing three aspects—the ground, mountains, and the horizon.

5. Use the Rule of Three in Flow Charts

Using the rule of three for this part is more complicated, but it is necessary to follow the rule. If you use graphs or flowcharts, you should have three main sections of that chart.

Flowcharts are great to show the process. If you want to follow the rule of three, make sure that It has three main sections.

If you use a graph to represent data, try to have three sections in your graph. For example, if you use a bar graph try having three bars in that graph if possible.

6. Use Three Main Colors

When deciding your color scheme, you should consider the rule of three. This can mean having three main colors that you use throughout your presentation. It can also mean having three colors on your slide.

Here are more PowerPoint rules that you can follow to make your presentation look better:

1. Rule of Thirds

You may be asking what’s the difference between the rule of three and the rule of thirds.

Let’s answer What's the rule of thirds?

The design rule of thirds is where you break up an image or design into different sections using columns and rows to form a grid. The grid is placed over the image and has nine equal boxes with three evenly spaced rows and columns.

The goal of the rule of thirds is that you don’t place the main elements in the center of images. You place the main elements on either the left or right. In the example above, you’ll see that the main focus (the girl with her dog) is on the left of the image, following the rule of thirds.

2. 5/5/5 Rule

The 5/5/5 rule says:

• You shouldn’t have more than five words per text in a line.
• Each slide should have no more than five lines.
• You shouldn’t have more than five text-heavy slides in a row.

When you have too many text-heavy slides in a row, it can tire your audience.

3. Font Rule

The font rule states that you should choose a font that is easy to read, and the color stands out against your slide background. Also, your text should be large enough for people in the back of the room to read it.

4. Seven by Seven

The seven-by-seven rule is where you use no more than seven words per line and no more than seven lines per visual.

If you need more words, make bullet points as sub-points below the main point. The maximum is one key point with six subpoints on a single slide.

Your slides are used to emphasize a single point. The example slide above follows the seven-by-seven rule because it has one key point and six sub-points.

5. Image Rule

The image rule is that you should use an image that is relevant to your presentation.

For example, if you’re doing a presentation on food, having an image of a basketball can confuse the audience. Your audience may forget the text but are more likely to remember your image. You also shouldn’t have too many images or graphics because they lose their effect if you do.

6. The One Principle

The one principle is similar to the image rule. It states that you should limit each visual to one idea, concept, or main point.

It can be overwhelming for the audience if you have more than one main point on a slide and use visuals for multiple points.

7. One-Minute Test

The one-minute test is where you put yourself in the audience's shoes. If your audience needs more than one minute to figure out what your slide says, then it’s too complex. If your slide is too complex, it can cause your audience to lose focus on what you’re saying.

8. 10/20/30 Rule

The 10/20/30 rule says a presentation should be no more than ten slides longer than twenty minutes and use fonts no smaller than thirty.

Some believe it's hard for audiences to comprehend more than ten concepts during a presentation. This means that your presentation shouldn’t have more than ten slides.

Knowing you have twenty minutes to give your presentation allows you to structure your presentation well.

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A good template has labeled sections where all you need to do is add your text into the text holders and images in the picture placeholders. Every premium template is by professionals to be stylish and impressive. If you like to add personal touches to your presentation, you can still use a good premium template that is easily customizable.

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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.

© 2024 TED Conferences, LLC. All rights reserved. Please note that the TED Talks Usage policy does not apply to this content and is not subject to our creative commons license.

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8 rules of effective presentation

Right now, it becomes more and more difficult for our brains to perceive the full diversity of digital content. Still, sooner or later, your college task will be to create it by yourself. Images, sounds, and messages overload our brains, so if you want to make an excellent and effective presentation, you should work hard. To cope with tons of information, you need to learn how to structure and present it correctly.

So, how to create a compelling college presentation and what mistakes to avoid?

Rule #1. Use the content to make your audience engaged

First of all, you should offer an engaging, well-structured, and successfully submitted content. This is the most significant part of your presentation design , and it’ll be evaluated in the first place. You don’t want your peers to look for their phones during the speech, do you? Be prepared to accept the fact that most people are not ready to listen to your words carefully. So your task is to change their opinion and make them pay attention.

Rule #2. Don’t read the text from the slides

As a rule, people don’t like it when the speaker repeats the text placed on the slides of their presentation. You must explain the information on each slide with your own words to make it sound persuasive. Otherwise, there is a risk that both your professor and your peers will simply fall asleep.

Rule #3. Don’t be too brief

Usually, the audience does not tolerate the fonts and images in a presentation that are too small. You can come up with a brilliant text for each slide, but all your creative work will be wasted if this text is not readable.

Rule #4. Make jokes and be sincere

If your topic allows, try to make a joke or two. Read these jokes to your friends first and check if they like it. Look at your audience, stop to make conclusions, smile. Even your professor will appreciate your communicative skills and charisma.

Rule #5. Use the right fonts

Believe it or not, but the font does affect the reader’s confidence in the text. Forty thousand people participated in the research to prove it. They were shown the same paragraph typed in different fonts: Comic Sans, Computer Modern, Georgia, Trebuchet, Baskerville, Helvetica. The results are the following: the text that is written in Comic Sans and Helvetica does not inspire readers’ confidence, but the Baskerville font, on the contrary, receives consent and approval. According to psychologists, this is due to its formal appearance.

Rule #6. Visualize

We all perceive information differently. When your professor asks you to make a lovely presentation, they usually have a particular image in their mind. And it may differ from yours a lot. Therefore, it is better to show pictures than to explain everything in words. Try to use clear illustrations for your key messages.

Rule #7. Simplify

Remember that “less” does not mean “boring.” It’s OK to use a white background. Don’t try to “decorate” the slide with a large number of objects if you can explain its essence in one word or picture. Using illustrations and a minimum of text, you can communicate with your peers and professor more effectively and grab their attention.

Rule #8. Practice makes it perfect

Creating an effective presentation is not just adding cool content and pictures to the slides; it is also the ability to present them. While making a speech, you should be understood, heard, and accepted. When you start to rush and jump from the 1st slide to 7th, and then back to 3rd, you will most likely forget something important. Will your professor understand something? I do not think so.

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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.

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• 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.

The 5/5/5 Rule for Presentations: How to Use it and Examples

Last updated on June 21st, 2024

In today’s fast-paced world, delivering effective presentations is more important than ever. Whether you are presenting to colleagues, clients, or conference attendees, the ability to communicate your message clearly and concisely is essential.

One proven method for creating visually appealing presentation slides is the 5/5/5 Rule. This rule is designed to streamline the presentation design process and keep your audience engaged. By following the 5/5/5 Rule, you’ll be able to create presentation slides that are both visually appealing and informative, leading to more successful presentations.

What is the 5/5/5 Rule?

The 5/5/5 Rule is a simple yet powerful guideline for creating presentation slides that are easy to understand and visually engaging. The rule breaks down into three components:

5 words: Limiting 5 words per line

When creating slide templates, it’s essential to prioritize readability. By limiting the number of words on a single line to five, you ensure that your text is easy to read and comprehend, even from a distance. This constraint forces you to be concise and choose your words carefully, ultimately leading to clearer and more effective communication.

The first “5” in the 5/5/5 Rule also encourages presenters to use succinct, powerful language. By condensing your message into a few essential words, you increase the likelihood that your audience will remember and understand the key points of your presentation.

5 lines: Limiting lines of text per slide

Too much text on a single slide can overwhelm your audience, making it difficult for them to process and retain the information being presented. By limiting the number of text lines to five, you reduce the cognitive load on your audience, allowing them to focus on the most important aspects of your message.

Visually appealing slides are crucial for keeping your audience engaged. When you limit the number of text lines on a slide, you create more white space, which can make your presentation slides look cleaner and more professional. This increased visual appeal can help maintain your audience’s attention and contribute to the overall success of your presentation. You can combine this idea with the rule of threes for presentations .

5 slides: Limiting consecutive slides with text

To keep your audience engaged, it’s important to break up long stretches of text-heavy slides. By limiting the number of consecutive slides with text to five, you encourage the use of visuals, multimedia, and other forms of content that can help maintain interest and enhance understanding.

Incorporating visuals such as images, infographics, charts, and videos into your presentation can help illustrate complex concepts and reinforce key points. You can separate essential parts of your presentations into different topics, then keep up to 5 slides in each section. Following the third “5” of the 5/5/5 Rule ensures that your presentation is balanced, engaging, and informative.

Benefits of the 5/5/5 Rule for Presenters

Implementing the 5/5/5 Rule in your presentation design process can lead to several benefits, including:

1. Enhanced audience focus

By reducing the amount of text on your slides and incorporating more visuals, you can help your audience focus on the essential aspects of your message. This focused attention can lead to increased understanding and retention of your presentation’s key points.

2. Improved information retention

When you simplify your slides and present information in a clear, concise manner, your audience is more likely to remember what you’ve shared. The 5/5/5 Rule helps you distill complex ideas into easily digestible slides, increasing the likelihood that your audience will retain the information long after your presentation has ended.

3. More effective communication

The 5/5/5 Rule encourages presenters to be mindful of their audience’s needs and attention spans. By following this guideline, you can communicate your message more effectively, making it easier for your audience to understand and engage with your content.

4. Reduced cognitive load

Limiting the amount of text on your slides and interspersing visuals helps reduce the cognitive load on your audience. When they are not overwhelmed by information, they can better process and remember the key points of your presentation.

How to Implement the 5/5/5 Rule in your own Presentations?

To incorporate the 5/5/5 Rule into your presentation design process, consider the following steps:

1. Analyzing your content

1.1 Identifying key points. Before you start designing your slides, take the time to identify the most important points of your presentation. This process will help you determine what information to include on your slides and how to structure your content effectively.

1.2 Simplifying complex ideas. Once you have identified your key points, consider ways to simplify and distill complex ideas into easy-to-understand concepts. This will make it easier for your audience to grasp your message and increase the likelihood that they will retain the information.

2. Designing your slides

2.1. Emphasizing brevity and clarity. As you design your presentation slides, focus on keeping your text concise and clear. Use the 5x5x5 Rule to guide you in limiting the amount of text on each slide, prioritizing readability and visual appeal.

2.2. Using visuals and multimedia effectively. Incorporate visuals, such as images, graphs, and videos, to support your message and engage your audience. Be mindful of the third “5” in the 5/5/5 Rule, and ensure that you break up long stretches of text-heavy slides with visually appealing and informative multimedia content.

3. Balancing text and visuals

3.1. Knowing when to break the rules. While the 5/5/5 Rule is a helpful guideline, it’s essential to recognize that there may be instances when it’s appropriate to deviate from it. Depending on the complexity of your topic or the needs of your audience, you may need to adjust the rule to suit your specific situation.

3.2. Tailoring your approach to your audience. Consider the preferences and expectations of your audience when designing your slides. Some audiences may appreciate a more text-heavy approach, while others may respond better to visuals and multimedia. Be flexible and adapt your presentation design to meet the needs of your audience.

Relevant Facts Related to 5/5/5 Rule for Presentations

• Attention spans: According to a study conducted by Microsoft, the average human attention span has decreased from 12 seconds in 2000 to 8 seconds in 2013, which is shorter than a goldfish’s attention span (Microsoft, 2015). The 5/5/5 Rule for presentation helps presenters deliver information concisely, catering to these shorter attention spans and improving audience engagement.
• Information overload: A study by the University of California, San Diego, estimated that the average American consumes about 34 gigabytes of data daily (Bohn & Short, 2009). The 5/5/5 Rule for presentation design helps presenters avoid overwhelming their audience with excessive information, allowing them to focus on key points and better retain the presented content.
• Visual learning: According to research, 65% of the population are visual learners (Bradford, 2016). By implementing the 5/5/5 Rule, presenters can create a balanced mix of text and visuals, enhancing understanding and information retention for a majority of the audience.
• Presentation effectiveness: A study from the University of Tennessee found that presentations using visual aids were 43% more persuasive than those without (Vogel et al., 1986). By limiting consecutive text-heavy slides, the 5/5/5 Rule for presentations encourages the use of visual aids, which can improve the overall effectiveness of a presentation.
• Cognitive load: Reducing cognitive load by simplifying information is an essential aspect of effective instructional design (Sweller, 1994), also relevant with the ADDIE model . The 5/5/5 Rule addresses this by limiting words per line and lines per slide, making it easier for the audience to process and retain the presented information.

The 5/5/5 Rule is a powerful presentation design tool for creating visually appealing and effective presentation slides. By limiting the amount of text on your slides, incorporating visuals and multimedia, and tailoring your approach to your audience, you can improve the overall success of your presentations. As you embark on your next presentation design process, consider implementing the 5/5/5 Rule to enhance your PowerPoint slides or Google Slides, and make your message more engaging and memorable for your audience.

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• Alternatives 🔥

5/5/5 Rule | How and Why to Use It with Best Examples in 2024

Ellie Tran • 05 April, 2024 • 9 min read

So, how to avoid bulky slides? Put a finger down if you have… 

• …done a presentation in your life.
• …struggled with summarising your content 🤟
• …rushed while preparing and ended up throwing every single bit of text you have on your poor little slides 🤘
• …made a PowerPoint presentation with loads of text slides ☝️
• …ignored a display crammed with text and let the presenter’s words go in one ear and out the other ✊

So, we all share the same problem with text slides: not knowing what’s right or how much is enough (and even getting fed up with them sometimes). 

But it’s no longer a big deal, as you can look at the 5/5/5 rule for PowerPoint to know how to create a non-bulky and effective presentation.

Find out everything about this type of presentation , including its benefits, drawbacks and examples in the article below.

Table of Contents

• What is the 5/5/5 rule for PowerPoint?
• Benefits of the 5/5/5 rule
• Cons of the 5/5/5 rule

Frequently Asked Questions

More Tips with AhaSlides

• Types of presentation
• What is 7x7?
• 10 20 30 Rule

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What Is the 5/5/5 Rule for PowerPoint?

The 5/5/5 rule sets a limit on the amount of text and the number of slides in a presentation. With this, you can keep your audience from being overwhelmed with walls of text, which can lead to boredom and searching elsewhere for distractions.

The 5/5/5 rule suggests you use a maximum of:

• Five words per line.
• Five lines of text per slide.
• Five slides with text like this in a row.

Your slides shouldn’t include everything you say; it’s a waste of time to read out loud what you’ve written (as your presentation should only last under 20 minutes ) and it’s incredibly dull for those in front of you. The audience is here to listen to you and your inspiring presentation, not to see a screen that looks like another heavy textbook. 

The 5/5/5 rule does set boundaries for your slideshows, but these are to help you keep your crowd’s attention better.

Let’s break down the rule 👇

Five words on a line

A good presentation should include a mix of elements: written & verbal language, visuals, and storytelling. So when you make one, it’s best not to centre around the texts only and forget everything else.

Cramming too much information on your slide decks doesn’t help you at all as a presenter, and it’s never on the list of great presentation tips . Instead, it gives you a lengthy presentation and disinterested listeners.

That’s why you should only write a few things on each slide to trigger their curiosity. According to 5 by 5 rules, it’s no more than 5 words on a line.

We understand that you have a bunch of beautiful things to share, but knowing what to leave out is as important as knowing what to put in. So, here’s a quick guide to help you do this with ease.

🌟 How to do it:

• Use question words (5W1H) - Put a few questions on your slide to give it a touch of mystery . You can then answer everything by speaking.
• Highlight keywords - After outlining, highlight keywords that you want your audience to pay attention to, and then include them on the slides.

Take this sentence: “Introducing AhaSlides – an easy-to-use, cloud-based presentation platform that excites and engages your audience through interactivity.”

You can put it in fewer than 5 words in any one of these ways:

• What is AhaSlides?
• Easy-to-use presentation platform.
• Engage your audience through interactivity.

Five lines of text on a slide

Text heavy slide design is not a wise choice for a fascinating presentation. Have you ever heard of the magical number 7 plus/minus 2 ? This number is the key takeaway from an experiment by George Miller, a cognitive psychologist.

This experiment implies that a human’s short-term memory typically holds 5-9 strings of words or concepts, so it’s hard for most ordinary people to remember more than that in a really short period of time.

That means that 5 lines would be the perfect number for an effective presentation, as the audience can grasp important information and memorise it better.

• Know what your key ideas are - I know you’ve put tons of thought into your presentation, and everything you’ve included seems so vital, but you need to settle on the main points and summarise them in a few words on the slides.
• Use phrases and sayings - Don’t write the whole sentence, simply pick out the essential words to use. Also, you can add a quote to illustrate your point instead of throwing everything in.

Five slides like this in a row

Having a lot of content slides like this can still be too much for the audience to digest. Imagine 15 of these text-heavy slides in a row - you'd lose your mind!

Keep your text slides to a minimum, and look for ways to make your slide decks more engaging.

The rule suggests that 5 text slides in a row are the absolute maximum you should make (but we suggest a maximum of 1!)

• Add more visual aids - Use images, videos or illustrations to make your presentations more diverse.
• Use interactive activities - Host games, icebreakers or other interactive activities to connect with your audience.

Instead of giving your audience a lecture, try brainstorming together to give them something different that helps them remember your message longer! 👇

Benefits of the 5/5/5 Rule

The 5/5/5 not only shows you how to set a boundary on your word counts and slides, but it can also benefit you in many ways.

Emphasise your message

This rule ensures that you highlight the most critical information to deliver the core message better. It also helps to make you the centre of attention (instead of those wordy slides), which means the audience will be actively listening and understanding your content better.

Keep your presentation from being a ‘read-out-loud’ session

Too many words in your presentation can make you dependent on your slides. You’re more likely to read that text out loud if it’s in the form of long paragraphs, but the 5/5/5 rule encourages you to keep it bite-sized, in as few words as possible.

Alongside that, there are three no-nos you can gain from this:

• No classroom vibe - With 5/5/5, you won’t sound like a student reading everything for the whole class.
• No back to the audience - Your crowd will see your before more than your face if you read the slides behind you. If you face the audience and make eye contact, you’ll be more engaging and more likely to make a good impression.
• No death-by-PowerPoint - The 5-5-5 rule helps you avoid common mistakes while making your slideshow that can make your audience tune out quickly.

Reduce your workload

Preparing tons of slides is exhausting and time-consuming, but when you know how to summarise your content, you don’t have to put too much work into your slides.

Cons of the 5/5/5 Rule

Some people say that rules like this are made up by presentation consultants, as they earn a living by telling you how to make your presentations great again 😅. You can find many similar versions online, like the 6 by 6 rule or 7 by 7 rule, without knowing who invented stuff like this.

With or without the 5/5/5 rule, all presenters should always strive to reduce the amount of text on their slides. 5/5/5 is pretty simple and doesn’t get to the bottom of the problem, which is the way you lay out your content on the slides.

The rule also tells us to include, at most, five bullet points. Sometimes that means filling a slide with 5 ideas, which is way more than the widely held belief that there should be only one idea in a fall. The audience might read everything else and think of the second or third idea while you’re trying to deliver the first one.

On top of that, even if you follow this rule to a tee, you might still have five text slides in a row, followed by an image slide, and then a few other text slides, and repeat. That’s not appealing to your audience; it makes your presentation just as stiff.

The 5/5/5 rule can sometimes go against what is considered good practice in presentations, like having visual communication with your audience or including some charts, data , photos, etc., to illustrate your point clearly.

The 5/5/5 rule can be put to good use, but it does have its own pros and cons. There is still a bit of a debate here on whether it’s worth using, but the choice is yours. 

Alongside using these rules, check out some tips to help nail your presentation.

Engage your audience better with your slides, learn more on AhaSlides interactive features today!

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How to reduce text-heavy slide design?

Be concise at everything like minimizing texts, headings, ideas. Instead of heavy texts, let's show more charts, photos and visualizations, which are easier to absorb.

What is 6 by 6 rule for Powerpoint presentations?

Only 1 thought per line, no more than 6 bullet points per slide and no more than 6 words per line.

A lifelong learner, a traveller and content creator eager to explore the best of both worlds: the real and virtual one full of interactive activities with AhaSlides.

Tips to Engage with Polls & Trivia

More from AhaSlides

The Only 10 Slides You Need in Your Pitch

I am evangelizing the 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint. It’s quite simple: a pitch should have ten slides , last no more than twenty minutes , and contain no font smaller than thirty points . This rule is applicable for any presentation to reach an agreement: for example, raising capital, making a sale, forming a partnership, etc.

• Ten slides. 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—and venture capitalists are very normal. (The only difference between you and venture capitalist is that he is getting paid to gamble with someone else’s money). If you must use more than ten slides to explain your business, you probably don’t have a business.
• Twenty minutes . You should give your ten slides in twenty minutes. Sure, you have an hour time slot, but you’re using a Windows laptop, so it will take forty minutes to make it work with the projector. Even if the setup goes perfectly, 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 discussion.
• Thirty-point font . The majority of the presentations that I see have text in a ten-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.

I hope this helps you create a winning pitch deck for your startup. If you’re interested in this template, you’re probably an entrepreneur. Please check out my podcast, Remarkable People , to learn from remarkable entrepreneurs such as Steve Wozniak (Apple), Melanie Perkins (Canva), Suzy Batiz (Poo Pourri), Steve Wolfram (Mathematica), and Melissa Bernstein (Melissa and Doug).

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About the author: guy kawasaki.

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46 Comments

Very good points. Sometimes less is more, especially when you are trying to get important points across and increase your credibility.

I fully subscribe to this logic…just find it interesting that were you to convert this excellent info-graphic to slides it would equal approximately 15 slides.

Your presentation is meant to support the message you’re communicating, not obscure it. I can’t agree with the thought ” a normal human being cannot comprehend more than ten concepts in a meeting “. Using more than ten slides to explain for my business may not break my standard level.thanks

Very good simple and pragmatic tool useful in various domains. I see many applications for NGOs either with policy makers or donors. We need more of those to help them integrate private sector good practices, and hence gain in professionalism, impact and coherence.

Why is this not the template used for Shark Tank?

HA! This is the exact same template used for Shark Tank, minus the deck / linear format. Otherwise, all these topics are the key focal points of their discussions.

Loved this article especially the part about “using a Windows laptop, so it will take forty minutes to make it work with the projector” .. hehehe!

I love this article. However, this comment ( his comment ) is unnecessary and distracting – it could have been eliminated and the article would be even stronger. I’ve been burned enough times with projectors and Apple computers that I rigorously avoid them – a personal choice. Yet, I wouldn’t have injected my bias about Apple into this article if I was wrote it. In ‘ The Art of the Keynote Guy says ‘ Don’t denigrate the competition ‘ – good advice. Apparently Microsoft is the competition. He should follow his own counsel.

And the reality is it’s true you wouldn’t spend 40 minutes trying to get it to work with an apple. You’d realize immediately you don’t have the right adapter that’d be that.

I didn’t get past the first line because the phrase is “in a pinch” not “pitch”.

Peggy is this a joke? The author is referring to a sales pitch. There’s no such thing as a “sales pinch.” He’s not referencing your phrase.

Only one slide is missing… Defensibility & IP. Every good pitch has some sort of moat. Trade secrets, patents, exclusivity agreements, etc. Investors want to have some sort of competitive advantage and protections.

Same goes for sales pitches.

Brian – wouldn’t that would be in the Underlying Magic?

Dave – Not really. The underlying magic is your “model”; what are you doing differently to address the need in the market?

As an investor, you want exclusivity in the market to that magical way of addressing the need. That means you have a legal way to defend the IP (e.g. patents, copyrights, etc.). With those elements your execution in fulfilling the need becomes less important, and thereby reduces investor risk, because in the end we can then license the IP to someone who can.

How would someone protect a big idea let’s say as example the idea of Facebook. A network idea. A big idea, but one that could be grabbed and replicated. How do you protect “the idea” even from those angel investors you are pitching to? Do you ask investors to sign anything before you pitch? I am stuck at this very fundamental starting point.

I agree. This is where I am stuck. My business model and idea are based around a network sales concept and exclusive market niche (a huge niche). How do I protect that? Do I need to protect this idea, even from presenting to investors? How do you protect a network concept, for instance how would you have protected the idea of Facebook going in to present the concept to investors? Is stealth, speed of execution, launch and quick scaling the only ways?

@Briand and Dave, What I recall from the book, Underlying Magic refers to differentiation; which can take the form of IP, unfair advantage or innovative resource/model.

Great Article. I completely agree with Guy, the attention span of most people is max 20 minutes after which the human mind has moved on. the slides may be more than 10 but really your message is only heard in the first 15 to 20 minutes. Lol so agree with the 40 minutes set up time :) that is something we see all the time..

Great article! nice to read. is there any example or presentation, if you have please share with us.

I would add use of pictures and graphs along with text in the presentation. Pictures catch great deal attention and they communicate well. I would also add presenter’s voice pitch and connecting with audience while presenting.

Guy’s 10 slides are clearly structured as a pitch presentation format for investors. Having now been on both sides of the table, I can confidently say they are an effective template / discipline for getting your story focused on the essential check list of questions that investors will have, for keeping their attention, and for whetting their appetites to want to learn more .. and potentially attracting a champion in the process. With a strong leader taking command of the presentation, these guidelines work well for improving your batting average attracting $. As Mark Twain said, “If I had more time I’d have made it shorter”. If that was ever more true, it’s with investors who are barraged daily with deals.

Love the 10/20/30 philosophy and am rewriting an article => video to follow. Some of the comments make me a bit concerned though.

some wat to relavent about internation affairs of nationality inthe antise social group….!!!!

What is your take on the PechaKucha format of 20 x 20 – 20 slides , 20 seconds each? In a world of decreasing attention spans do you think this format has the ability to add a bit more Zing and Energy to a presentation? Allows more time for Q & A then too.

This is very, very helpful to me in creating my pitch.

This is realy helpful I using the same in my studies here in Kenya

Thank you GK, I used it. I raised capital for my young company.

Very good simple and pragmatic tool useful in various domains. well elaborated design and understandable.

Funny thing is, I am using Canva for a project presentation in a Strategic Sales class and this was the first useful article I found to help me get a start on it.

I can agree with this as someone who make many pitch decks. I like the idea of 10, but it is not feasible as there is no consumer insight, media quotes, simple marketing plan, etc. Yes. there should be 10 topics, but that does not mean 10 slides as some topics do take multiple slides, even if just a media coverage quote on a slide to introduce a topic.

Guy Kawasaki pitch deck are very small but very helpful for startup, however have a look this one pitch deck, https://goo.gl/QaCrPT it have 450+ slides cover all the topics of every pitch. 6 categories template such as marketing, sales, investor, startup,

I think it’s interesting that “Exit Strategy” is a stupid question. Perhaps what Guy is saying is the “Underlying Magic” is the exit strategy?

I really like the book The art of start 2.0. He explains in simple words and its easy to understand. I recommend the book!

I agree with Guy’s thoughts. In addition: Make up a deck. Show it to a friend. Then 2 days later ask them what it said. Tweak the deck so that the viewer is left with 3 or 4 most important bullets. These should be very much akin to the notions in the Elevator Pitch.

Does anyone have any good examples of anyone using this format? It would be nice to see this applied.

People invest in people so my pitch decks, based on Guy’s approach, have the team slide in position #2. The 3-4 key individuals are listed as follows:

Joe Shmo Head of Engineering Cal Berkeley – MS Computer Science Previously VP Engineering @ Lightning Networks (acquired by Cisco) Driving product development

I don’t make a big deal about the CFO and never use “R&D” in the pitch. VC’s early on dictate who the CFO is, and one VC told me years ago that “research is done in universities, not with my money”

Limit of 10 slides enforces you to be concise, to see and display a core of the project. And it is critical to be understandable for audience. When you don’t spend additional time of investors, they see that you respect them. So they will respect you.

I’m looking for a pitch deck for a veterans non-profit.

Hello every body,

I’m a senior counselor for entrepreneurship and business in knowledge-based as well as normal habitant civil services. In my opinion, the very pre-condition for any good presentation is good idea with tested de-coupled sub-phases of the business. The investor and his/her venture capitalist is plausibly expert to capture the subject.

If you don’t have a great and sizable business idea don’t expect that you will win with any trick such 10/20/30. These rules are suitable for great-idea owners.

One of my ask for pitch deck. Your advise on pitch deck relief me from the pressure.But when i started to do the pitch deck , it takes 3 hours to complete and i made only 8 slide. I realized that i am weak at PowerPoint presentation. Can you release a course on power-point? Thank You

Valuable help for all our startups.

The article is very well written; short but useful. Thanks for sharing such a useful piece of content.

Guy, I love this format and I push it on all the entrepreneurs I coach. As I’m prepping to give a presentation and share it though, I see that the infographic form is actually impossible to present in PPT. Text is too small and formatting isn’t right. Seems like the infographic needs a little rework to be most useful!

Very well written article. Thanks for sharing such a useful piece of content.

Beautiful Article, Guy! Short and to the point and explained your points with proper justification. Rhyming concept 10/20/30 too.

Minimalism at its finest. 10 slides felt a bit less at first but the infographic made things very clear.

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• Google Slides Tutorials

How to Print Presentations in Google Slides: Complete Walkthrough

Creating a compelling Google Slides presentation is just half the battle; on delivery day, you might need physical handouts for your audience. Whether you’re a student, educator, or professional preparing for a meeting or workshop, effectively printing your Google Slides presentation can save time and ensure your materials look professional. This comprehensive guide will walk you through every step of the process, from setting up your slides for printing to choosing the right print settings, ensuring your audience has clear and informative takeaways.

Step-by-Step Guide to Printing Presentations in Google Slides

Step 1: open your google slides presentation.

First, open the presentation you wish to print. Ensure that your slides are complete and formatted how you want them to appear in print. 

Step 2: Access the Print Settings

Open the “File” menu located in the upper-left corner of the screen. From the dropdown menu, select “Print preview.” This will open a new view where you can see how your slides will look when printed.

Step 3: Choose Your Print Layout

In the print preview screen, you have several layout options. You can print one slide per page, multiple slides per page, or even include a notes section. Select the layout that fits your requirements best. For handouts, printing multiple slides per page is often the most efficient option.

• One slide per page: Best for detailed presentations where each slide contains a lot of information.
• Multiple slides per page: Ideal for handouts and summaries, allowing you to fit more content on fewer pages.
• Notes pages: If you need to present additional information alongside your slides, printing with notes can be useful.

Step 4: Adjust Other Print Settings

In the preview screen, you can adjust other settings like page orientation (portrait or landscape), paper size, and whether to include the background. Consider these settings carefully to ensure your presentation looks its best when printed.

Step 5: Print Your Presentation

Click on the “Print” button, once you have configured all your settings. A standard print dialog box will appear, allowing you to choose your printer and finalize your print job. Double-check your settings here to ensure everything is correct.

Tips for Better Printing

• Check Margins and Layout: Ensure your slides fit well within the margins to avoid content getting cut off.
• Use High-Quality Images: Low-resolution images can look pixelated when printed. So, always ensure that the images are of high quality.
• Preview Before Printing: Always use the print preview feature to check how your slides will look in print.

Going Green Tip: Consider double-sided printing to save paper and reduce your environmental footprint!

Final Touches: Acing the Handout

Here are some final touches to ensure your handouts are professional and user-friendly:

• High-Quality Paper: Choose a paper type that complements your presentation’s content and visuals. Glossy paper might be suitable for presentations with a lot of images, while matte paper works well for text-heavy content.
• Clear Headers and Footers: Add headers or footers with the presentation title, date, and your contact information for easy reference.
• Punch Holes (Optional): If your handouts are meant to be placed in a binder, consider adding pre-punched holes for easy organization.

Bonus Tips:

To make your presentations more visually appealing, consider using premade Google Slides themes available online. These themes can save you time and ensure your slides have a professional look. Many websites offer free themes that you can easily customize to fit your presentation’s content.

If you often find yourself needing to print presentations in the MS PowerPoint platform, you might also be interested in our detailed guide on how to print presentations in PowerPoint. 

By following these steps and incorporating some creativity, you can ensure your Google Slides presentations translate flawlessly into impactful printed materials.  If you found this guide helpful, be sure to check out our other resources for more tips and tricks on creating and printing presentations. So, go forth and print with confidence!

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Arockia Mary Amutha

Arockia Mary Amutha is a seasoned senior content writer at SlideEgg, bringing over four years of dedicated experience to the field. Her expertise in presentation tools like PowerPoint, Google Slides, and Canva shines through in her clear, concise, and professional writing style. With a passion for crafting engaging and insightful content, she specializes in creating detailed how-to guides, tutorials, and tips on presentation design that resonate with and empower readers.

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• Mammography Quality Standards Act (MQSA) and MQSA Program

Important Information: Final Rule to Amend the Mammography Quality Standards Act (MQSA)

The FDA issued a final rule on March 10, 2023, to amend the MQSA regulations (“2023 MQSA Final Rule”). Enforcement of the MQSA regulations as amended by the 2023 MQSA Final Rule began on September 10, 2024. Facilities subject to the MQSA, must now comply with all applicable requirements, including the breast density notification.

Access the 2023 MQSA Final Rule in its entirety at  Federal Register: Mammography Quality Standards Act .

MQSA Inspections

During a facility’s annual MQSA inspection, inspectors will review documentation that relates to whether the facility is meeting the requirements of the MQSA. As of September 10, 2024, the MQSA regulations have certain additional requirements, including:

Mammography Reports

• Name and location of the facility performing the exam, (at a minimum the city, State, ZIP code, and telephone number).
• Probably Benign
• Highly Suggestive of Malignancy
• Known-Biopsy-Proven Malignancy
• Post-Procedure Mammogram for Marker Placement. 
• Incomplete: Need additional imaging evaluation
• Incomplete: Need prior mammograms for comparison.
• "The breasts are almost entirely fatty." 
• "There are scattered areas of fibroglandular density." 
• "The breasts are heterogeneously dense, which may obscure small masses." 
• "The breasts are extremely dense, which lowers the sensitivity of mammography."

Patient Lay Summaries

• The patient's name, and the name, address, and telephone number of the facility performing the exam.
• Not dense: "Breast tissue can be either dense or not dense. Dense tissue makes it harder to find breast cancer on a mammogram and also raises the risk of developing breast cancer. Your breast tissue is not dense. Talk to your healthcare provider about breast density, risks for breast cancer, and your individual situation." 
• Dense: "Breast tissue can be either dense or not dense. Dense tissue makes it harder to find breast cancer on a mammogram and also raises the risk of developing breast cancer. Your breast tissue is dense. In some people with dense tissue, other imaging tests in addition to a mammogram may help find cancers. Talk to your healthcare provider about breast density, risks for breast cancer, and your individual situation."

Communication of Results

When the exam has a final assessment category of "Suspicious" or "Highly Suggestive of Malignancy," the mammography report is provided to the health care provider and the patient lay summary is provided to the patient within 7 calendar days of the date the mammogram was interpreted. When the exam has an assessment of "Incomplete: Need prior mammograms for comparison," the facility issued a follow-up report with a final overall assessment within 30 calendar days of the initial report, regardless of whether comparison views are obtained.

Medical Outcomes Audit

The annual medical outcomes audit includes the positive predictive value, cancer detection rate, and recall rate for each interpreting physician as well as for the facility as a whole.

Additional Information About the MQSA Final Rule

This information is not an exhaustive list of everything contained in the 2023 MQSA Final Rule. As always, facilities are required to comply with all mammography requirements applicable to them under the MQSA and its implementing regulations. Below is an overview and/or excerpts of some of the additional requirements of the 2023 MQSA Final Rule. It is important to note that the FDA may take enforcement action for noncompliance with the MQSA regulations, whether observed during an annual inspection or determined by other means.

Accreditation Failures

If a facility has failed to become accredited after three consecutive attempts, no accreditation body must accept an application for accreditation from the facility for a period of 1 year from the date of the most recent accreditation failure.

(21 CFR 900.4(a)(6)(ii))

All devices used in mammography must have met the applicable FDA premarket authorization requirements for medical devices of that type with that intended use. (21 CFR 900.12(b)(2)(i))

Personnel Records

To comply, facilities must: 

• Maintain records of training and experience
• Ensure records are relevant to their qualification under MQSA
• Interpreting physicians
• Radiologic technologists
• Medical physicists 

Records must be available for review by MQSA inspectors.

Records of personnel no longer employed by the facility must be maintained for no less than 24 months from the date of the departure of the employee, and these records must be available for review at the time of any annual inspection occurring during those 24 months.

The facility must provide copies of these personnel records to current interpreting physicians, radiologic technologists, and medical physicists upon their request. 

Facilities must provide personnel records to former employees if the former employees communicate their request within 24 months of the date of their departure. 

(21 CFR 900.12(a)(4))

Recordkeeping

Facilities must maintain the original mammograms and mammography reports in a permanent medical record of the patient for the longest of the following:

• a period of not less than 5 years, 
• a period of not less than 10 years if no additional mammograms of the patient are performed at the facility, or 
• a period, if longer, mandated by State or local law. 

Facilities must implement policies and procedures to minimize the possibility of loss of these records. The original mammograms must be retained in retrievable form in the mammographic modality in which they were produced.  They cannot be produced by copying or digitizing hardcopy originals. 

(21 CFR 900.12I(4)(i))

Transfer of Records or Release of Copies

Transfers of mammograms and mammography reports, or release of copies, must take place within 15 calendar days of the facility receiving the request. For digital mammograms or digital breast tomosynthesis, if the examination is being transferred or released for final interpretation purposes, the facility must be able to provide the recipient with original digital images electronically. Additionally, before a facility closes or ceases to provide mammography services, it must make arrangements for access by patients and healthcare providers to their mammographic records. The facility must notify its accreditation body and certification agency in writing of the arrangements it has made and must make reasonable efforts to notify all affected patients.

(21 CFR 900.12(c)(4)(ii), (iii), (v))

Facility Responsibility to Self-Referred Patients

Each facility that accepts patients who do not have a healthcare provider must maintain a system for referring such patients to a healthcare provider when clinically indicated, which must include when such patients' mammogram assessment is either probably benign, suspicious, or highly suggestive of malignancy.

(21 CFR 900.12(c)(2)(ii))

Please direct any questions to the MQSA Hotline at [email protected] or 1-800-838-7715.

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A water park with 12 slides and a lazy river is opening in Florida. Here’s when and where

A new indoor water-park resort in Florida is ready to make a big splash.

Great Wolf Lodge in Naples, on the state’s Gulf coast, will have a grand opening Sept. 18. The original timetable for the park’s opening was Oct. 1, set after Hurricane Ian in 2022 ravaged Southwest Florida and delayed construction.

This is the first Florida location for Great Wolf Lodge , with the company’s only other branded indoor water park resort in the Southeast in Atlanta.

The Naples park is near the Interstate 75 interchange at Collier Boulevard, next to the Paradise Coast Sports Complex and about a two-hour drive from Miami.

Reservations have been open since 2023.

MORE: A top waterpark in Aventura

What’s at Wolf Lodge water park?

Here’s what to expect at the water attraction:

▪ A 92,000-square-foot indoor water park, heated to 84 degrees, featuring a wave pool, lazy river, play areas and 12 water slides, including an attraction called Breakaway Bay.

▪ A 60,000-square-foot family entertainment center known as the Great Wolf Adventure Park offers a variety of family-friendly attractions, including MagiQuest — a live-action adventure game where players use interactive magic wands to battle goblins and dragons.

▪ Family events and activities including Yoga Tails, a morning exercise program, and evening events such as the Hustle & Howl dance party and Story Time event.

▪ Several dining options ranging from pizza and burgers to upscale dining and premium ice cream treats at Wood’s End Creamery.

▪ Family-friendly suites in a variety of categories and styles including suites with separate sleeping quarters for kids designed as either a log cabin or wolf den and outfitted with bunk beds. The resort will also feature suites with multiple bedrooms for large families or multi-generational groups.

11 Breezy Slides For Effortless Spring Dressing

Ready your winter boots for storage because easier dressing is on its way. You can start with these simple slides, available to shop right now.

September marks a long-awaited time of transition, as spring’s official beginning demands a different approach to dressing.

The memo for making it work in warmer weather? Making your wardrobe breezier and easier.

No other garment captures this quite like a pair of sandals. Cosy merino socks and enveloping leather boots can start to feel stuffy after months of wear. The appeal of a sandal is its lack of demands – simply slip on and you’re ready to go.

Of course, though the mornings and evenings are brighter, the fresh spring winds and sunshowers mean we’re not quite ready to dive into freeing spring and summer wear. But, on the warmer days, we’re likely ready to dip our toes in.

Brother Vellies slides $867

These “strawberry cow” slip-ons might make you crave a Primo. These closed-toe clogs sing out a little yeehaw with each step, bolstered with the addition of a dusty western buckle. The cow print also comes in black and brown, but this light pink colourway feels like a sweet and joyful spring addition.

Bronwyn slides $309

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These puffy, minimalist sandals were designed with everyday wear in mind. They have a leather upper, which will soften with each wear, and a raised rubber sole, for flexibility and durability. This sandy colourway is an aspirational pick for the season. The slides also come in a simple black.

La Tribe slides $340

Delicately handwoven leather creates interest atop these platform sandals. They’re a great pairing to elevate more minimalist ensembles and easily transition between various free-time occasions (from cafe, to park, to beach).

Deadly Ponies slides $449

The twisting strap on these slides is architecturally eye-catching. Local brand Deadly Ponies and creative director Liam Bowden offer this addition to the spring and summer range, with a symmetrical silhouette made of leather.

Tony Bianco slides $206

The classic cut of a Mary Jane shoe has inspired these slick flats. Crafted from real leather, these slip-ons find two specific points of interest; a faux snakeskin print and a tapered square toe. The latter is a distinctly ‘90s detailing (though, of course, it has a longer history in mod tropes and ballet traditions).

Alias Mae slides $254

These sandals adopt a utilitarian function and apply a little polish. Their cut is comparable to a casual pair of Birkenstocks , but the materials embrace a sense of gloss that will fit for nicer outdoor occasions.

St Agni slides $479

This textural take gives a signature St Agni style an update. The simple slide is finished in tightly woven leather and is available in two staple colours: black and brown.

Mi Piaci slides $240

These netted mules offer a sleeker option for spring and summer wear. The coffee brown slides will be an easy pairing for jeans and dresses and could be a great swap for wintry loafers and boots.

Wales Bonner slides, $975 , from Muse

Ostentatious, glitzy and loud in their patterning, these slip-ons make a major statement. The upper is made from calf hair and dyed to mimic calf or dalmatian spots. With the bedazzled buckle, they feel reminiscent of 2000s dressing. These are great for an extrovert.

Birkenstock slides $370

The Birkenstock clog, beloved by chefs and fans of The Bear , isn’t going anywhere. This pair takes up this season’s offer of refreshment, crafted in a minty shade of green. You’ll also find the slides in taupe, mink and elemental blue.

Abigayle slides, $424 , from Head Over Heels

These soft suede mules are handcrafted in Portugal. Their oversized buckle is particularly interesting, with organic shaping and pewter colouring.

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11 breezy slides and sandals for effortless spring dressing

Are you ready to dip into warmer weather dressing?

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