How many slides does the average PowerPoint document have? What proportion of them have images on them? Or animation, or transitions? My students will answer this question comprehensively in an upcoming research project that they are running as part of my market research class. As our sample frame, we will use the .com, .org., .edu, and .mil domains on the Internet, and we have developed an approach to gather a large, genuinely random sample of a few hundred PowerPoint files, which we will then analyze. We are planning to execute this later this month (September) and then post the results here.
In the meantime, if any of you have any characteristics that you’d like us to add to the research, let me know, in the form of a comment to this post.