Powerful PowerPoint for Educators: Using Visual Basic for Applications to Make PowerPoint Interactive

Link ing Out side Your Pre sen ta tion:
Web Pages and Other Doc uments
While link ing within your presentation allows your presentation to be in ter-
active, link ing out side your pre sentation allows the interactivity to ex tend be-
yond PowerPoint and al 
lows your PowerPoint document to serve as a
springboard to other resources. Dur ing a lecture, you can jump to a rel evant Web
site via a link in your presentation or jump to any other doc ument on your com-
puter. An in 
teractive project can in 
clude some of the content within the
PowerPoint pro ject and use hyperlinks to con nect to Web pages with more de -
tails, Word documents with ex tensive ru brics for matted as tables, mov ies or
sounds in formats that PowerPoint cannot recognize, etc.
To link to a Web page, choose the “Web Page” tab in Figure 2.8 (page 23)
or “Existing File or Web Page” in Fig ure 2.9 (page 23). From there, simply type
the URL (uniform re source lo cator; that’s the Web address) in the box labeled
“Ad dress” or “Link to.” Be sure to include the complete ad dress (which gener-
ally starts with “http://”). Alternatively, click on the but ton la beled “Launch
Web Browser” or the “Browse the Web” icon (it looks like a globe with a magni-
fying glass) to launch your Web browser. In some versions of PowerPoint, wher-
ever you browse will au tomatically be in serted as the link; in other versions, you
24 Tra di tional Mul ti me dia Fea tures of PowerPoint

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will have to copy the URL and paste it into PowerPoint. Note that if you have to
paste and your Edit menu isn’t active, you usu ally can use the keyboard shortcut
(control-V in Win dows or command-V on a Macintosh) to paste.
To link to another document, choose the “Doc u ment” tab in Figure 2.8 or
“Existing File or Web Page” in Fig ure 2.9. Click on the “Locate . . . ” but ton or
the “Browse for File” icon (it looks like an open folder with an arrow opening it)
to get the standard Open File di alog box. In Windows, you might have to pick
files of type “All Files” to be sure you can see doc uments that PowerPoint does
not recognize.
Note that when you are choosing a file, you are creating a link. Just like
linked sounds, if you want PowerPoint to be able to open the doc ument when the
presentation is moved to an other computer, you should put the file in the folder
with your PowerPoint file before linking to it.
But tons
Sometimes you want your us ers to click on text to fol low a hyperlink, and
sometimes you want them to click on a button. PowerPoint provides but tons
with a few dif ferent icons for different pur poses. Choose “Ac tion But tons” from
the Slide Show menu, and a flyout menu will ap pear with either icons for but tons
or names of but tons. Figure 2.10 shows the twelve dif ferent kinds of but tons:
Custom, Home, Help, In formation, Previous Slide, Next Slide, First Slide, Last
Slide, Last Slide Viewed, Document, Sound, and Movie.