How many slides do you need
A practical rule: one slide takes 1–1.5 minutes. A 10-minute talk needs 8–10 slides; a 20-minute lecture needs 15–18.
For students: 10–12 slides for an independent-work defence, 12–15 for coursework, 15–20 for a diploma. For a school lesson, 7–10 works best.
Don't overload a slide. More than five bullets and the audience starts reading instead of listening.
What a good slide looks like
One slide, one idea. The shape is simple: a concrete heading, 3–5 short bullets, and one visual if needed.
Make the heading carry meaning: "Water use rose 18% in 2020–2025" says more than "Introduction".
Write in points, not sentences. A slide is an outline; leave the full commentary to the speaker notes, which the system writes for you.
Types of slides in a deck
Title slide — topic, author, institution. Agenda slide — the structure of your talk.
Content slides carry the body: definitions, classifications, stages, comparisons. A stats slide turns figures into a bar, pie or line chart.
The conclusion gathers results into 3–4 points. The last slide holds references or a Q&A prompt.
The system picks types by topic: timelines for history, charts for economics, comparison tables for pedagogy.
Common mistakes
Pasting a whole paragraph onto a slide is the most common one — the room reads and stops listening.
More than four colours, a decorative unreadable font, a stretched low-quality image — each of these costs you credibility.
No source. If you show a figure or a quote, credit it in small type; that alone prevents half the questions at a defence.
Preparing for the defence
Read the finished file aloud end to end and time yourself. If you run long, cut a whole slide rather than trimming text — the talk holds together better that way.
For each slide, write one sentence: "what am I proving here". If there's no answer, the slide is redundant.
Use the speaker notes — only you see them. Put figures, dates and terms there; there's nothing to memorise.
Panel questions usually come down to three: where the source is from, what the figure means, what the conclusion rests on. Prepare those answers in advance.
Which apps open the file
The result is a PPTX — PowerPoint's standard format. It opens fully in Microsoft PowerPoint (Windows, macOS, mobile), Google Slides, Apple Keynote, LibreOffice Impress and WPS Office.
To open it in Google Slides, upload the file to Google Drive and choose "Open with Google Slides". Fonts may shift slightly; the structure holds.
On a phone, the PowerPoint or Google Slides app is enough. On defence day, send the file to yourself on Telegram — a backup if the computer fails.