The following are interesting statistics provided by slideshare (a.k.a., YouTube for PowerPoint) based on all of the presentations posted during 2011 and the 1,000 presentations deemed to be “most popular.”
Some of these statistics are counter to what I have seen reported/recommended as presentation “best practices.” It tells me we still have a way to go to improve upon “death by PowerPoint.”
Here are the key findings:
- Average slides per presentation = 22
- Women use fewer slides (22) than men (26)
- Average number of images in all presentations is 21, with 37 in the most popular presentations
- Percent of slides containing images is 72% in all presentations versus 62% in the most popular
- The 1,000 most popular presentations have a lot of slides (65) but few words per slide (32). I actually find this to be a very high number of words per slide versus previous recommendations.
- The most popular fonts are Helvetica and Arial — both at 14%. Times New Roman was only 2%
What changes are you able to make to improve your presentations?
