How Much Text Belongs on a Slide? It Depends What the Deck Is For
The advice is contradictory because two different problems are being solved. "Six words per slide" is correct for a deck you present. "Enough to stand alone" is correct for a deck you email. Applying either rule to the wrong situation produces a bad deck.
Decide the format first. For distributed creative and development teams, a related operational reference is the reference, focused on coordination across locations and time zones.
Three formats
The presented deck. You are in the room, narrating. The slides support you. Minimal text — a headline stating the point, and a visual. Everything else is spoken.
The sent deck. Read without you, in an inbox, at speed. It has to carry the full argument. Denser, self-explanatory, closer to a designed document than to slides.
The read-along deck. Presented on a call where people are also reading, or presented and then circulated. The awkward middle, and the most common real situation. Practical format guidance is available in the Microsoft PowerPoint support.
Most decks are used in more than one way, which is why so many end up over-dense for presenting and under-explained for reading.
The presented deck
Roughly six to fifteen words per slide. One headline making a claim, one supporting visual.
The reason is not aesthetic. If a slide contains a paragraph, the audience reads it — silently, faster than you speak — and stops listening. You are then competing with your own slides.
Rules that follow:
- Headline states the conclusion, not the topic. Not "Q3 Results" but "Q3 grew 40% on Gulf expansion"
- One idea per slide. Two ideas means two slides — slides are free
- Detail goes in speaker notes, not on the slide
- Charts labelled directly, no legend hunting
- Nothing on the slide that you are going to read aloud
Slide count is not the constraint. Thirty sparse slides present faster and land better than twelve dense ones. Splitting a crowded slide into three costs nothing.
The sent deck
Here the slide must survive alone. Density is not the enemy; ambiguity is.
Roughly 40 to 80 words per slide in a structured layout — headline, brief body text, labelled visual.
Rules:
- Headline still states the conclusion
- Two to four short sentences, or three to five tight bullets, doing the explaining
- Charts fully labelled with axes, units, period, and source
- Anything requiring narration to make sense gets rewritten or cut
- Appendix carries the depth
The test: send it to someone who was not in any of the conversations and ask what the argument is. If they cannot reconstruct it, the deck is not doing its job.
Maintaining two versions
For high-stakes material — an investor raise, a major pitch — maintaining both versions is worth the effort. The presented version is sparse; the sent version has the explanation written in.
For everyday internal decks, it is not worth it. Build the sent version and accept slightly denser slides when presenting, or build sparse slides and attach a one-page written summary alongside.
That second option is underrated. A short document explaining the argument, plus a clean deck for the room, is often better than either a dense deck or a sparse one sent without context.
Bullets
Bullets are not inherently bad. They are badly used.
Bullets work for genuinely parallel items — a list of features, a set of options, sequential steps.
Bullets fail when used to fragment a continuous argument. Three bullets that depend on each other are a paragraph with the connective tissue removed, and the reader has to reconstruct it.
Practical limits:
- No more than five per slide
- One line each where possible, two at most
- No sub-bullets. A sub-bullet means the slide is carrying too much
- Parallel grammar — all starting with a verb, or all noun phrases
If you cannot express the content as parallel items, it is not a list. Write it as a sentence.
Type size
A practical floor: 24 points minimum for anything meant to be read in a room.
This works as a constraint rather than a rule. If your content does not fit at 24 points, it is too much for one slide, and shrinking the type hides the problem instead of fixing it.
For sent decks the floor can drop to around 16 points, since the reader controls their own zoom. Below that, mobile readers cannot use it.
The failure that matters most
Not too much text. Not too little. Ambiguity about which format you are building.
A deck built dense for reading, then presented, competes with the speaker. A deck built sparse for presenting, then forwarded, communicates nothing to the person who receives it.
Ask one question before you start: will this be presented, sent, or both? The answer determines everything else on this page.
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