PowerPoint Lecture Room 2: The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint

Guy Kawasaki, whose blog “How to Change the World” was ranked in the top 2,000 most-popular blog globally in September 2009, is a famous Silicon Valley venture capitalist, who has put forward the 10/20/30 rule of PowerPoint. It is this idea that is an optimal outline for the content, length, and font of a good presentation, which is very helpful for each PowerPoint presenter, as well as applicable for any presentation to achieve the goal.

He points out that: a PowerPoint presentation should have ten slides, last no more than twenty minutes, and contain no font smaller than thirty points.

• Ten slides

The presentation cannot be too short or too long. If it will be too short, the speaker will not reveal the essence of the matter. If it will be too long, the audience will get tired and will pass over the very important information.

Many PowerPoint presenters always try to put on slides everything they know about the topic of their presentation. This is a typical mistake. You should select key points only from the information you have found. Do not put unessential information: it will divert attention from the key points of your presentation.

A normal human being cannot comprehend more than ten concepts in a meeting. Thus, the recommended number of slides for a presentation is ten. You can add more for necessary and interesting details, in-depth explanation, or tricky questions, if it will be necessary. Do not forget that, try to concentrate on the absolute essentials.

• Twenty minutes

Try to get through your presentation in twenty minutes. There are several reasons for this.

First, you will not be given more than twenty minutes if there are other speakers. Second, people usually keep concentration during 15-20 minutes. After this period, the level of concentration starts decreasing very fast. The information, which will be presented after twenty minutes period, will be missed. Last but not the least, the time for discussion should also be taken into consideration.

• Thirty-point-font text

Generally, it will be very difficult for the audience to read the text smaller than fourteen points. If you have to use a small font to present your information, it means that you are putting too much detail on the slide. Each slide should contain one key point.

Use slides to lead, not read. They should paraphrase and enhance what speaker is trying to say. Because people can read faster than you talk, if you put too much detail on the slide, the audience will read ahead of you and not listen to what you are saying. The result is that you and the audience are out of synch.

Guy Kawasaki states in his blog that, “if ‘thirty points’ is too dogmatic, I offer you an algorithm: find out the age of the oldest person in your audience and divide it by two. That is your optimal font size.” It is a little funny, but you can have a try.

In a word, outline a few words about the topic you are going to present, and then describe these few words in detail. This approach will be more effective than putting everything you know on the slide.

By the way, you can burn your PowerPoint Presentation with Moyea PPT to DVD Burner Pro to DVD to play it on a DVD player, or convert it into a video via Moyea PPT to Video Converter to upload it to Youtube. Just try it.

Links: PowerPoint Lecture Room 1: Ways to Make an Excellent PowerPoint

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