Questions Slide: What to Put on a Q&A Slide, What to Cut
The last slide of a deck is the one the room looks at longest, and most decks hand it to a question mark. That is a decision, not a formatting detail. Whatever sits there is on screen for the whole discussion, and it is still there when the file gets forwarded to somebody who was never in the meeting. A large part of the professional advice says the slide that reads "Any questions?" should not exist at all, and the case is better than it first sounds. This page takes a position on whether you need one, sets out what belongs on a questions slide when you keep it and what to cut, and scores the six things you could put in that final position against the meeting you are actually walking into.
Quick answer: what goes on a questions slide?
The slide is optional. The position is not: something will be on screen while the room asks its questions, and the only real choice is what that something does for you while it sits there.
A questions slide, also called a Q&A slide, works when it carries four things: a heading that restates the actual topic rather than the word Questions, a one-line recap of the decision you want feedback on, a pointer to the backup detail in the appendix, and contact details for anyone who thinks of a question later. Cut the stock question mark, the repeated thank-you, and any data you have not already shown. In a board or client meeting, a slide holding the recommendation beats a slide holding a question mark, because the room stares at it for the entire discussion and the file outlives the meeting.
How we judged what belongs in the final slide position
Every option below was scored on the same five questions, all of them about what happens in the room and afterwards rather than about how the slide looks.
What the room actually does with it
Whether the slide produces a question, a decision or a silence. Judged on what is on screen during the discussion, not on how the slide looks in a screenshot.
Whether it survives being sent as a file
In empower's Ultimate Global PowerPoint Study, 57 percent of employees said they regularly share presentations with external parties, where the file stays and can be forwarded. Most people who see your last slide were never in the room.
Whether it earns the most-looked-at moment
The final slide is on screen for the whole discussion, which is usually the longest single view any slide in the deck gets. Anything that sits there has to be worth that much attention.
Whether it holds up in a large or split room
Microsoft's 2025 Work Trend Index special report found that meetings with 65 or more attendees are the fastest-growing type, and that nearly a third of meetings now span multiple time zones, up 35 percent since 2021.
What it costs when it fails
The failure modes are different. A dead Q&A costs you a minute. A missing contact line costs you the question somebody thought of on the train home, which was probably the objection that decides the thing.
What we ignored: template galleries, stock artwork, animation and reveal effects, and every claim about how much of a presentation an audience remembers. That last family of numbers is the most repeated thing in presentation advice and the least sourced, so nothing here rests on it.
Key takeaways
- Decide what the room should be doing, then pick the slide. If the meeting ends in a decision, the recommendation belongs on screen during the discussion. If the meeting exists to surface questions, a questions slide earns its place. Very few meetings need both.
- Assume the file outlives the meeting. With 57 percent of employees regularly sending presentations outside their own company, a final slide reading only Questions is a blank page to every later reader. A recommendation, a contact line or an appendix pointer still says something.
- The last position is expensive, so spend it on content. Whatever sits there is looked at for the entire discussion, and it is the last thing anyone sees before the deck closes. A stock question mark is the lowest-value thing you can put in the best slot.
- Big and split rooms break the raised-hand model. In the 65-and-over rooms Microsoft reports as the fastest-growing meeting type, or across time zones, questions have to be collected somewhere other than the air in the room, and the slide has to name that channel or nobody uses it.
- Cost of failure decides the tie. When two options score the same, keep the one whose failure is cheap. Losing a follow-up costs more than losing a minute of silence, which is why contact details survive cuts that a question mark does not.
The six options for the last slide, compared
Six things can occupy the slot after your final content slide. Scored against the five criteria above they separate cleanly: the options that carry information beat the options that carry a courtesy, and two of them are really corners of a slide rather than slides in their own right.
| Final slide | What the room does with it | Survives as a file | Earns the last position | Big or split room | Cost when it fails |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Q&A or questions slide | Opens the floor explicitly. Does not itself generate questions. | Weak. A question mark tells a later reader nothing. | Only when it restates the topic and the ask. | Poor on raised hands alone. Needs a named channel. | A silence, then the room packs up. |
| Summary of the recommendation | Gives the room something specific to argue with. | Strong. Reads correctly with no presenter attached. | Yes. The decision is what should be on screen. | Strong. Works read as well as heard. | Low. You already wrote the slide. |
| Contact details | Captures the question that arrives an hour later. | Strong, and this is the whole point of it. | Not on its own. It is a corner, not a slide. | High value across time zones. | The follow-up goes to nobody. |
| Appendix pointer | Tells the room the detail exists and where. | Strong when the appendix travels with the file. | Not on its own. One line, small type. | Good. Removes the live scramble for a number. | You hunt for the model in front of everyone. |
| Thank-you slide | Signals the end. Adds nothing to the discussion. | Weak. Carries no information at all. | No. It spends the best slot on a courtesy. | Neutral. It is invisible either way. | A wasted final minute, and a flat ending. |
| Nothing at all | Leaves the recommendation up by default. | Strong, because the last real slide is the last slide. | Yes, when the recommendation is genuinely last. | Strong, with no extra work. | No home for contact details or a pointer. |
Q&A slide: should you have one at all?
This is the most argued convention in presentation practice, and the argument is not really about design. Writing for IEEE-USA in 2019, Jacquelyn Adams put the objection plainly: the final slide is "valuable real estate that should not be wasted on a pithy request for questions". She also makes the point that gets skipped, that silence at the end of a talk is not evidence your argument landed. The communication trainer Andy Bounds reaches the same place from a different direction, arguing that neither "Any questions?" nor "Thank you" is a call to action, and that "communications are supposed to cause something to happen".
The empirical picture supports the sceptics on one specific point: the slide is not what produces questions. In a survey of 225 talks at the 223rd meeting of the American Astronomical Society, Davenport and colleagues recorded an average of 2.8 questions per talk, in a room of professionals whose job includes asking them. Who asks is narrower still. Carter, Croft, Lukas and Sandstrom, observing 250 seminars across 35 institutions in 10 countries for PLOS ONE, found women about two and a half times less likely to ask a question than men despite an audience that was on average evenly split. A slide that says Questions leaves the agenda to whoever is quickest to raise a hand.
The workable middle position keeps both. Put the questions slide second to last, run the discussion against it, then close on the recommendation or the next step. Bounds goes further and words that final slide as the action itself, with headings like "Our immediate next steps" or "Three options for how we progress this". Either way you get the clean handover to discussion without giving the last thing anyone sees to a question mark.
The trade-off: a Q&A slide buys an unambiguous handover from presenting to discussing, and spends the most looked-at moment of the deck on a word the room could already see coming.
Questions slide: what do you put on it when you keep one?
Four things earn their place, because each one changes what happens in the room. Everything else is decoration on the slide you are looking at for longest.
A heading that restates the topic. Not the bare word Questions. Put the subject back on screen, for example "Questions on the Q3 pricing change", so anyone who drifted off knows what they are about to ask about.
A one-line recap of the decision or ask. Restate what you want back from the room. An open floor produces the long silence; a specific ask produces a reaction, and the reaction is what you came for.
A pointer to your backup material. One line naming where the detail lives, for example "Full model in the appendix, slide 14". It keeps the answer ready and tells a later reader the depth exists.
How to reach you afterward. Your email in small type in a corner. Some questions only occur to people after they leave, and this is the only slide that stays up long enough for anyone to write it down.
Three things show up on almost every questions slide and none of them help the discussion that is about to start.
A stock question-mark graphic. A speech bubble, a giant question mark, a shrugging figure. It carries no information, it dates the deck, and it is the single most common thing on this slide.
A repeated thank-you. If your closing slide already thanks the room, do not thank it again here. Two courtesies compete for the same space and neither helps the discussion that is starting.
New data you have not shown. Do not use the final slide to slip in a chart there was no time for. Introduced cold, while people are forming questions, it reads as something you did not stand behind.
The trade-off: a loaded questions slide works harder than a bare one, and it takes ten minutes you were planning to spend on the slide before it.
Thank you slide: does it earn the last slide of the presentation?
The thank-you slide is the default ending in a great many decks and the hardest of the six to defend. The case against it is the case against the question mark, only sharper, because a courtesy carries even less information than an invitation. Say thank you out loud. Do not spend a slide on it.
The reason the ending matters more than its length is one of the better-evidenced findings in decision research. Redelmeier and Kahneman, studying 154 patients undergoing colonoscopy, found that how unpleasant people judged the whole procedure to have been tracked its worst moment and its final moments, and correlated almost not at all with how long it lasted. Endings are weighted out of proportion to the time they take. That is an argument for putting your recommendation, not your manners, in the final frame.
There is one honest exception. When the deck is a leave-behind for an audience who will never hear you speak, a closing slide carrying your name, your team and the next step is doing a job that spoken thanks cannot. That is a contact slide wearing a thank-you heading, and it is fine.
The trade-off: a thank-you slide gives a talk a soft, unambiguous ending, and it is the weakest possible use of the page most likely to be screenshotted or forwarded.
Summary slide: is the recommendation a better close than questions?
In any meeting that ends in a decision, yes. The room is going to spend the discussion looking at one slide, and the most useful thing to look at is the recommendation being argued about: what you propose, what it costs, what happens next, who has to agree. Questions then attach to something concrete instead of to the general idea of the presentation, which is also the fastest way to find out whether the room understood the ask.
This is the same slide you would put at the front of the deck, reused at the back. Building it is a subject of its own, so rather than repeat it here, see how to build an executive summary slide for the structure, and the executive summary slide examples for layouts that survive a hostile read. The opening bookend has its own rules too, covered in the title slide examples guide.
The trade-off: closing on the recommendation keeps the decision in front of the room and gives a hostile question a precise target to attack, which is uncomfortable exactly when it is most useful.
Contact slide: where do your details actually belong?
In a corner, on whatever slide ends up last. A whole slide for an email address is a slide, and the address is legible at nine point. What makes it non-negotiable is that the audience for your final slide is bigger than the room. In empower's 2020 Ultimate Global PowerPoint Study, a survey of 1,102 employees at companies in Germany and the United States, 57 percent said they regularly send presentations to external parties, where the file stays and can be forwarded on again.
Distance makes it matter more. Microsoft's 2025 Work Trend Index special report, drawn from a survey of 31,000 knowledge workers across 31 markets, found nearly a third of meetings now span multiple time zones, up 35 percent since 2021. Some of the people with questions about your deck are asleep while you present it. The line that lets them reach you is worth more than the graphic it replaces.
The trade-off: contact details cost almost nothing and capture the late question, and on their own they are a business card, not an ending.
Appendix pointer: how do you park the detail without losing it?
One line, small type, naming where the supporting material lives: the full model on slide 22, the methodology in the backup, the source workbook in the shared folder. It does two things at once. Live, it lets you answer a deep question by jumping to a slide instead of promising to follow up. On the file, it tells a reader who was not there that the detail exists, which is the difference between a deck that looks thin and one that looks edited.
The pointer is also the cheapest defence against the scramble. If you know which three questions are coming, the appendix slides that answer them cost less to build than the improvised answer costs you in the meeting.
The trade-off: a pointer buys you depth without lengthening the main deck, and it only pays if the appendix is actually there and numbered the way the line says.
No closing slide: when should the deck just stop?
When the last content slide is already the thing you want on screen. A recommendation, a next-steps table, a phased plan: leave it up, say the words that open the floor, and take questions against it. Nothing about opening a discussion requires a slide to announce it, and every extra slide is another thing a reader has to scroll past to reach the substance.
The version to avoid is the accidental one, where the deck stops because you ran out of slides and the room is looking at a chart from the middle of an argument. Ending on nothing works when it is chosen. It reads as an error when it is not.
The trade-off: stopping on the recommendation is the shortest path to a working ending, and it leaves you nowhere to put contact details or the pointer to the appendix.
How do you build the final slide: by hand, a template, or a prompt?
By hand is usually right, and it takes two minutes. Duplicate the closing slide so the template carries over, strip the body, set the heading on the master. The reason people do not do it is timing rather than difficulty: Microsoft's Work Trend Index found PowerPoint editing spikes 122 percent in the ten minutes before a meeting, and the last slide is what gets built in that window.
A template site is the fastest route to something that looks designed. Canva's free questions slide maker, Slidesgo and SlideModel all hand you a finished layout, and for a conference talk or a class that is a reasonable answer. The catch is that the layout arrives in somebody else's colours, and the artwork at the centre of it is usually the exact question mark this page argues against.
Oria sits in the third route, generating the slide from a description rather than a gallery, through a PowerPoint add-in that runs as a task pane on Windows, macOS and PowerPoint for the web, and through a connector for Claude and ChatGPT over MCP so the slide can be built from the chat you are already in. It is built for corporate documents: board packs, steering committee decks, diligence exhibits, dense frameworks held to an enforced corporate template. That focus is the point and the limit. For the version of this slide that matters here, a decision recap held to your house style, it is aimed at the right target. For a founder pitch deck, a launch deck or a campaign one-pager, where the job is visual impact rather than defensible content, Gamma, Canva, Pitch and Beautiful.ai will beat it and look better doing it. If that is your deck, start with the comparison of Gamma and the consulting-deck alternatives instead of with us.
The trade-off: generating the slide from a prompt keeps the whole deck on one template and removes the ten-minutes-before scramble, and it is the wrong tool entirely when what you needed was a beautiful slide rather than a defensible one.
Handling the questions once the floor opens
The slide sets up the discussion. What happens next is about the first ten seconds after you stop talking.
Wait longer than feels natural. Mary Budd Rowe, in classroom research published in the Journal of Teacher Education, found teachers filled a silence within about nine-tenths of a second, and that stretching the pause to three to five seconds produced longer answers, more of them, and more questions from the people who had stayed quiet. The same arithmetic applies in a boardroom.
Repeat or paraphrase the question before answering. Half the room did not hear it, anyone dialled in certainly did not, and the paraphrase buys you a second to think and a chance to sharpen a vague question into an answerable one.
If you do not know, say so and name a date. A specific follow-up beats a guess every time, and it is exactly what the contact line on the slide is for. Write the commitment down in front of them.
Watch the clock, not the raised hands. One detailed exchange can eat the entire slot while four people wait. Offer to continue with that person afterwards, then move on deliberately rather than apologetically.
Which final slide should you use, by meeting type?
The six options do not carry equal weight in every room. What a board needs from the final slide is not what a town hall needs, and the gap is wide enough to change the answer.
For meetings where the whole deck, not just the last slide, has to hold up under questions, the Claude skills for slide design cover the storyline side of the same problem.
Frequently asked questions
What is a Q&A slide?
A Q&A slide, also called a questions slide, is the slide a presenter leaves on screen while the audience asks questions at the end of a talk. Its job is narrow: mark the handover from presenting to discussing, and hold something useful in view while that discussion runs. It is not the same thing as a closing slide or a thank-you slide, even though many decks fold all three into one crowded final slide.
How should a Q&A slide look?
Plain, and full of the topic rather than a graphic. A heading that names the subject instead of the word Questions, one line restating the decision or ask you want feedback on, a small pointer to the appendix, and your contact details in a corner. No stock question mark, no second thank-you, no data the room has not already seen. It should look like a working slide, because for the length of the discussion it is the only one on screen.
How do you make a Q&A slide in PowerPoint?
Duplicate your closing slide so the template, fonts and footer carry over, then strip it back to a topic heading and one line of text. Set the heading on the slide master rather than by hand so it matches every other title in the deck. Add contact details in the footer area at 9 or 10 point. If you are pulling a layout from a template site, replace its artwork with your own type, because the imported graphic is usually the exact question mark worth cutting.
Should you end a presentation with a thank you slide?
Say thank you out loud, and give the slide to something that does work. The end of an experience carries disproportionate weight in how it is remembered, which is why a courtesy is an expensive thing to leave on screen. If the deck will be forwarded, a thank-you slide is also the least useful final page a later reader can land on. Keep the words, spend the slide on the recommendation or the next step.
Where should the questions slide go in a presentation?
Second to last, if you use one at all. Open the floor on the questions slide, then move back to the recommendation or next-steps slide to close, so the discussion does not decide what stays on screen at the end. Merging the questions slide into your summary looks efficient and reads badly: the room ends up splitting attention between a closing message and an open invitation to interrupt it.
Should you take questions during the presentation or at the end?
For a decision meeting, take them at the end so the argument runs in one piece and you control the pacing. For an internal working session or any room under about ten people, take them as they come, because holding a question for twenty minutes usually kills it. Either way, say which you are doing in your first minute, so nobody spends the talk deciding whether to interrupt.
What do you do if nobody asks a question?
Wait longer than feels comfortable, then ask a specific question yourself. In the classic wait-time research, teachers filled a silence in under a second, which is far too fast for anyone to compose a question, and three to five seconds of quiet is what actually produced one. If nothing comes, name the question you expected, answer it, and point the room at the follow-up channel. Silence is not agreement.