PitchBoostIn 17 PowerPoints uploaded for redesign between 6 and 17 September 2026 (375 slides), the median deck was 20 slides, 43% of slides carried 8 or more lines of text, 23% carried more than 80 words, and 13 of the 17 decks had no title placeholder on any slide.
When someone uploads a deck to PitchBoost, the product reads every slide's text, chart data and images before rebuilding it. That read gives an unusually honest look at what working decks look like before anyone designs them. This is the first, small cut of that data; the sample will grow and the page will be updated with each cut.
How long decks are
The 10 to 15 slide pitch deck of the advice columns is not what people have. The middle of this sample is twice that, and the top quarter is longer still.
- Median deck length
- 20 slides
- Middle half of decks
- 15 to 26 slides
- Longest deck
- 40 slides
- Decks longer than 10 slides
- 15 of 17 (88%)
- Decks longer than 25 slides
- 6 of 17 (35%)
How much is on each slide
A slide with more than 80 words is a document, not a slide. Almost a quarter of the slides in the sample are documents, and 12 of the 17 decks contained at least one.
- Median words per slide (deck average)
- 63 words
- Median words per deck
- 1,278 words
- Slides with more than 80 words
- 85 of 375 (23%)
- Slides with 8 or more lines of text
- 162 of 375 (43%)
- Slides with no readable text (image only)
- 22 of 375 (6%)
Structure and data
Most decks did not use PowerPoint's title placeholder at all; titles were typed into ordinary text boxes, which is why so many tools mislabel slides. Native charts were rare, and every deck in the sample contained numbers somewhere.
- Decks with a title placeholder on every slide
- 1 of 17 (6%)
- Decks with no title placeholders at all
- 13 of 17 (76%)
- Decks containing native PowerPoint charts
- 3 of 17 (18%)
- Decks with money or percentage figures
- 8 of 17 (47%)
- Decks containing any number
- 17 of 17 (100%)
- Decks in a right-to-left script (Arabic, Persian)
- 3 of 17 (18%)
Where the decks came from
Of the 12 uploads with a known country: United States 3, Brazil 3, and one each from Singapore, the United Kingdom, Lebanon, France, Panama and India. The redesign use case is not an American one.
Method
- Source: the slide content PitchBoost extracts from uploaded .pptx files (titles from title placeholders, body text from every text box, chart series as text). Counts are computed over that extracted content, not by opening the files again.
- Sample: every PowerPoint uploaded for redesign by accounts outside the company between 6 September (when extracted content began to be retained) and 17 September 2026. Test accounts and internal uploads are excluded. 17 decks, 375 slides.
- A "line" is a line break in the extracted text of a slide; a "word" is whitespace-separated. "No readable text" means the extraction found no text at all on the slide, which usually means an image or a screenshot.
- "Title placeholder" means PowerPoint's own title field. A slide whose heading was typed in a normal text box counts as having no title placeholder, because that is how every downstream tool, including screen readers and outline views, sees it.
Limitations
- Seventeen decks is a small sample and the users are self-selected: people who wanted a deck redesigned. Decks people are happy with are under-represented by definition.
- Line and word counts depend on the extraction. Text inside embedded objects, speaker notes and images of text are not read and do not appear in these numbers.
- The sample will be recut monthly. Each cut is published as a dated update below the original rather than replacing it.
How to cite
Free to quote and reproduce with attribution (CC BY 4.0). Suggested citation:
PitchBoost, "What people actually upload: 375 slides from 17 real decks", September 2026, https://pitchboost.ai/research/uploaded-decks-september-2026
Questions about the data: support@pitchboost.ai. Other studies: the research index.