How Many Slides for 5 Minutes Presentation

5 minutes, does it sound significantly less for a presentation it is sufficient time. In other words, your audience starts getting bored listening to you after this period. Only if you are a good storyteller and an even better orator will you not need to make extra efforts to make your listeners stay with you. Confusion still prevails over how many slides for 5 minutes presentation. Let’s cast a glance at the solutions.

Read related articles on the Role of Planning in making an effective PowerPoint presentation.

How Many Slides to Include in a 5-minute Presentation?

The final answer may be different from one presenter to another. In our 10-minute presentation article, we discussed a presentation with 5 slides to be covered within 10 minutes. For a 5-minute presentation, a total of 5 slides will be desirable, including the cover slide and the last slide for Q&A. This, at a speech rate faster than the presentation of 10 minutes. This makes room to include 3 inner slides (after the cover or introduction, and before the Q&A slide). In these 3 slides, you can include the core of your message and keep the audience engaged.

What are examples of 5-minute presentation topics?

Whether you are preparing a topic for a class, or a business presentation, if 5 minutes is a requirement of your presentation, then here are some ideas of topics for your 5-minute presentation.

A 5-minute product demo

Perfecting your demo is not a synonym of taking more time to present it. You can wrap your product demos in less than 5 minutes, which will help keep your audience fully engaged. Plan your product demo accordingly, and keep it covered in a 5-minute presentation.

Regardless of how long your introduction is, the audience won’t be engaged for more than 5 minutes, and they will only pay attention to the five minutes of it. So, prepare your product demo and speech to wrap it within 5 minutes and rock it.

Demo Day Pitch Presentation

Accelerators and conferences are holding pitch competitions and demo days with more frequency these days. At the same time, many new entrepreneurs are interested in pitching on theseatvents, so it is crucial for the organizers and the presenters to keep the Demo Day pitches short. 

As mentioned above, five minutes might not sound like a long time, especially when presenting on stage. Furthermore, when you are part of a demo day presentation, the audience must watch many of these presentations one after the other. You need to wow them, and one way to wow them, aside of using great visual slides, is to keep your presentation short. 

For other ideas, you can check our article about PowerPoint topic ideas.

How to Prepare yourself for a 5-Minute Presentation

1. Choose Your Subject Intelligently

The topic of the presentation plays a crucial role in deciding how long it will stay attractive to the listeners. Although you might not always get the chance to pick a topic, you can present it from an angle with a captivating approach.

For instance, if it is a boardroom presentation, you certainly cannot divert it much. Therefore, statistical demonstrations and references to the latest market scenarios prove helpful and attention-seeking factors. There might be instances when you will be given dry topics; insert some videos and other amusing stuff. It saves you the unnecessary effort of trying to please the audience, which often backfires.

2. Divide the period

Since it is five minutes, you cannot speak for one minute on every slide. Furthermore, time will also be consumed in the introduction, closing speech, and interacting with the participants/audience. Therefore planning and time management are vital in these types of presentations.

Moreover, some technical stuffs need to be kept in mind too. Since the time allotment per slide will be uneven, your content on the slide, as well as your speech need to complement this requirement.

3. Do Not Stay on a Slide for Long

Avoid staying for longer period on a slide. The more expedient step will be if you have least content on the slide and you do the talking. Let images speak; this way you can change the slides to your requirement and even increase their numbers.

Although experts say that time frame has little role to play while deciding the number of slides, yet one cannot ignore the importance of every passing minute. For it is time that will make or break your presentation results.

Final words

How many slides for a 5 minute presentation? This is a common question from someone who is preparing a short presentation and needs to understand how many slides to include in the PowerPoint. The main thing to keep in mind when crafting a 5-minute presentation is not to ramble on too much and keep your audience engaged. And, of course, it’s always important to end on a high note.

As you can see, there is not a fixed number of slides that you should use for a 5-minute presentation. It all depends on the content and your storytelling style. The total number of slides might vary. For example, if you want to share an interesting story about your work or a new product launch, then there’s no need to go overboard with visual aids. Next time when preparing a presentation, keep these tips in mind and be sure to leave some breathing space as well.