Maximium number of Slides

  • Thread starter Thread starter Paul Cooper
  • Start date Start date
P

Paul Cooper

Does anyone know if there is a limit to the number of
slides Powerpoint will take as I'm about to start a large
project and don't want to get half way through and find it
crashes.
 
For all practical purposes, there is no limit to the number of slides that
can be used in a presentation.
However, there are some considerations

A single large file (larger than 500megs) will tax the systems resources.
If there are a large number of slides you may want to break the presentation
into several smaller files that are connected with a master presentation.

In PowerPoint 2000 (and I think also 2002) the numbers can range from 0 to
9999. The slides numbering of a presentation can also be started at any
number in that range. If the actual number of the slide is important to
you, these can be adjusted.

A slide presentation with 1000 slides (where the average screen time is 10
seconds) will take almost 3 hours to complete. While these presentations
are often interesting to the author, the audiences excitement often wanes
after the first hour.


If there is a different aspect of the numbering we can help with, please do
not hesitate to post back,
B
 
Does anyone know if there is a limit to the number of
slides Powerpoint will take as I'm about to start a large
project and don't want to get half way through and find it
crashes.
Click to expand...

If you haven't see this yet, go to www.pptfaq.com and click this link: Don't
use PowerPoint for anything serious until you've done this. If you have,
well, maybe this is a reminder for those who have not. :-)

John O
 
I was curious about the 9999 number, and did a few tests recently. As
far as I can tell, the limit is really a combination of your patience,
and your computer's patience, based on it's resources.

I'm using PPT2K with W98SE, on a 300Mhz machine with 128M of ram.
Since I was interested in only the maximum number of slides, the only
content on the slide was the slide-number placeholder. Of course any
content on the slide would further tax the system resources.

Concentrating first on the outline view, 9999 was the largest slide
number shown. Beyond that, it appeared that there was a leading period
to represent the truncated number. However, when I got to 20,000 and
beyond, there were now two leading periods, sort of like a colon.

But looking at any slide, the preview pane, or in slide sorter view,
the entire number was shown correctly. It seems that only outline view
cuts off the display of the entire number. The leading periods I was
seeing I'm guessing are just the last pixels of the digit visible,
depending on the font. I did not try other fonts.

The largest show I was able to create this way was 21,000 slides,
before I lost patience and had to go on to other things. However, my
computer lost patience before that, and the largest show it would
bother to save for me was only 17,000 slides.

In terms of real world shows, the largest I've been involved with was
about 2640. This was surtitles to accompany a play. Because of the
circumstances of who was actually operating the computer during the
performance, it was easier to create one large show instead of one for
each act, which would have been of more manageable sizes.

Villem Teder
Toronto
 
Back
Top