Whether you're a newbie at PowerPoint or a presentation professional, here's one question that seems to surface a lot. How many slides should you include in your presentation?

Many PowerPoint experts will use "1 slide per 2-3 minutes" as a general rule, but truthfully, it isn't quite that cut and dried.

How many slides you need depends a lot on what kind of material you're presenting, and to what sort of audience.

For example, if your presentation is of a particular sales product, then more slides containing photographs may be more effective than less slides featuring text. Likewise, if you're presenting highly detailed or technical information to a group of people who are very familiar with industry terms and metrics that you're presenting, you may use more slides that you pass through rather quickly, but which are necessary to provide supporting documentation.

Consider the purpose of your audiovisual support. Is it your intention to reinforce the verbal points with visual images? Do you need the graphics as a starting point from which you will explain results, trends, predictions or specific outcomes? Are you using visuals merely to keep your audience engaged, to provide humor, and/or to incorporate more types of learning styles?

How large is your audience, and do you intend to field questions throughout your presentation, or only at the end?

Let's look at some specific examples.

Suppose your audience consists of colleagues in your field, and you are presenting new evidence that will be explained and supported by graphics and charts. A very brief presentation (say, two to three minutes in length) might consist of 5 or 6 slides, depending on how much detail you will verbalize for each graphic. A ten-minute presentation may include 5-12 slides (again, depending on how long the slide needs to remain visible while you are explaining the specific metrics or results).

Now suppose you are delivering a new product presentation of 15 minutes in length to decision-makers who are potential clients. You could use as few as 5 slides (speaking in detail on each slide), or as many as 20-25 (if you were zipping through product images and pointing out specific features or selling points). However, if the nature of your product was so new and revolutionary that it required extensive education and explanation, you might have as few as 5-10 slides for the same 15-minute presentation.

When you take all of these factors (detail, technicality, audience size and awareness, etc.) into consideration, you can see that the only short answer to "how many slides should I use" is this:

"It depends."

But hopefully this article provided you with the information you need to make an informed decision about how many slides will work best for your presentation. Good luck!