Free tool
Speaking time calculator
Find out how long your presentation will actually run, and whether it fits the slot you were given. Drop your deck and the words are counted for you — in your browser, so the file never leaves your machine.
Estimated run time
13 min 24 sec
Likely between 11 min 24 sec and 15 min 24 sec
Comfortably inside your 20-minute slot, with about 6.6 minutes spare
Your file is read in this browser and never uploaded.
- Talking
- 10 min 42 sec
- Slide changes
- 2 min 42 sec
- Words per slide
- 75
How to work out how long your presentation will take
- 1
Get your word count
Drop your .pptx above and it is counted instantly, or type the numbers in yourself if your script lives somewhere else.
- 2
Set your pace and your slot
Pick the speaking rate that matches your delivery, then enter the time you have been given and any minutes reserved for questions.
- 3
Adjust until it fits
The estimate updates as you type. If you are over, it tells you roughly how many words — and how many slides — to cut.
Why the usual rules of thumb fail
"One slide per minute" is not a model
A title slide and a slide with a dense table take wildly different times to present. Speech is paced by words, so this counts words and treats the slide count as separate overhead.
Slide changes cost real time
Eight seconds a slide for advancing, the room looking up, and the beat before you speak again. Trivial once, four minutes across thirty slides — and most of why an 18-minute talk runs to 24.
It tells you what to cut
Being told you are six minutes over is not actionable. Being told to cut about 840 words, which is roughly four of your slides, is something you can go and do.
Nothing is uploaded
The deck is unzipped and read inside your browser. No file is sent to us, so there is nothing to store, nothing to delete, and nothing to take our word for.
What to expect
No converter is lossless. These are the cases where the result will not match the original, stated up front rather than discovered on the file that mattered.
- This is an estimate with a stated range, not a stopwatch. Real delivery varies by more than ten percent between a calm rehearsal and a nervous one, which is why a range is shown rather than a single number.
- It counts the words that are in the file. If you speak from memory around sparse slides, count your speaker notes instead — there is a tick box for it — or type your script's word count in directly.
- Demos, videos, audience exercises and interruptions are not modelled. Add them to the Q&A field.
- The slide overhead assumes you talk over your slides continuously. A deck you click through in silence will run shorter.
- Only .pptx can be counted automatically. For anything else, type the numbers in.
Questions people actually ask
Including the two that bring most people here in the first place.
Over your slot because the deck is too long?
Skiaw writes decks to a brief, so you can ask for a ten-minute story instead of trimming a forty-slide one down to size.