The Perfect Length of time for a PowerPoint Presentation Is...

What’s the perfect length of time for a PowerPoint presentation.

Is it an hour.

30 minutes.

Never more than 20 minutes.

17 minute TED Talk style.

Ten minutes.

The shorter the better the answer is none of those answers work the perfect length of a PowerPoint presentation is as long as it takes to communicate the ideas that are really important to you that are also interesting to your audience and you’re doing it in a way that’s memorable and engaging.

I’d far rather you give a 90 minute PowerPoint presentation that people find interesting and riveting and memorable than to give an incredibly concise tight focused 9 minute PowerPoint presentation that everyone finds boring dull on is instantly forgotten so it’s not about some simple metric of it’s exactly the right length.

It’s about does it work.

Sure audience paying attention to you are the understanding and remembering your ideas.

If you’re incredibly interesting people will stay on the edge of their seats.

We’ve all seen short little Internet videos that are boring after 10 seconds and yet so the most powerful successful movies of all time Titanic Avatar Gone With The Wind.

They are two or three hours long.

They’re a long long long movies and people want war because they find it interesting.

Focus on being interesting and memorable.

Accomplishing your objectives the length will typically take care of itself.