No matter if you are planning to work with PowerPoint, Keynote, or Google slides.. you are probably wondering how long it will take you to make a presentation.
Making a simple presentation with a few slides and a great message takes anything from 20 – 60 hours. This includes crafting content, designing slides, and preparing. An actual time depends on your topic, the complexity of your slides, and the message that you want to get across.
While this is a very broad estimate, we need to have a much closer look at the whole process.
Crafting content for one slide usually takes about 10 minutes (in some cases it takes hours).
Designing each slide usually takes me around 40 minutes on average. And I am working as a presentation designer! It’ll be probably a bit more for other people. Of course, there are situations when designing a slide takes me literally 15 minutes once branding is established and there’s little content.
So if we include preparation and brainstorming and messaging.. we can estimate that one slide usually takes about 60 minutes to produce (10 minutes for copy + 40 minutes for design).
So how does this stack up for bigger presentations? Let’s have a look at this list:
| Amount of slides | Time spent (average) |
|---|---|
| 1 | 50 minutes |
| 5 | 5.5 Hours |
| 10 | 11 Hours |
| 20 | 22 Hours |
| 30 | 33 Hours |
| 60 | 66 Hours |
| 90 | Around 100 hours |
Please, take these with a grain of salt. Some presentations are much easier than others. For ex. I was once designing a presentation for the sales team. In their presentation, they were using a lot of graphs so it took me around 90 minutes to take care of one slide.
On the other hand, the presentation for the agency was much simpler and it took me around 30 minutes per slide.
How long does it take to make 10 slides?
It takes around 11 hours to make a 10 slide presentation. That includes content creation, brainstorming, and design of each slide. Time will vary depending on the industry and complexity of the slides. Some slides take longer than the others, so this is an only the average estimate.
How long does it take to make a 30 slide presentation
For a 30 slide presentation, it is recommended to prepare around 30-35 hours. This time is usually needed for content creation and design of the slides. But it really depends on the industry and topic.
Wrapping it up
Do not forget to add a few more hours on top for preparation and brainstorming.
If you want your presentation to look really good, make sure you save a few hours upfront for the design part alone. In case you cannot, reach out to me and we can chat about how we can work together.
