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

Link ing Within Your Pre sen ta tion
Being able to link to other places in your file makes PowerPoint a more
powerful presentation tool, but it also gives you the power to create pro jects that
users nav igate themselves. Pre sentations no longer have to go from one slide to
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the next to the next to the next. You can make them go any where. If you are giv -
ing a presentation, you might want to link to slides with the answers to questions
you an ticipate be ing asked. If you are creating something for your stu dents, you
might use a menu structure in which stu dents choose a topic from a menu and
when finished with that topic, jump back to the menu.
To link to another place within your PowerPoint presentation, create a few
slides first, per haps cre ating a menu slide that will link to the other slides. High -
light the text you want to link and choose “Hyperlink” from the In sert menu. Be
sure to high light the text; if you don’t, PowerPoint will make a sin gle word the
link. See Fig ure 2.7.
Figure 2.7. In sert Hyperlink
The exact for mat of the dialog box that you see will vary based on which
version of PowerPoint you use, but it should look very similar to Fig ure 2.8 or
Fig ure 2.9.
22 Tra di tional Mul ti me dia Fea tures of PowerPoint

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Figure 2.8. In sert Hyperlink Di alog in PowerPoint 2001
Figure 2.9. In sert Hyperlink Di alog in PowerPoint 2002
In some versions, you will see tabs for “Web Page,” “Doc u ment,” and
“E-mail Ad dress” (see Fig ure 2.8). In other ver sions, you will see tabs for “Ex-
isting File or Web Page,” “Place in This Document,” “Cre ate New Doc u ment,”
and “E-mail Ad dress” (see Fig ure 2.9). To link your text to an other slide, choose
“Doc u ment” or “Place in This Document.” If your screen looks like Figure 2.8,
click on the “Locate . . . ” but ton in the “An chor” section of the di alog box. Now
your screen should look like part of Figure 2.9 with choices to link to “First
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Slide,” “Last Slide,” “Next Slide,” “Pre vi ous Slide,” “Slide Ti tles,” and “Cus-
tom Shows.” If you don’t have any choices for slides un der “Slide Ti tles,” click
on the triangle or plus sign next to “Slide Ti tles” and the names of all your slides
should appear. This is where you can choose a particular slide to link to. Click on 
the slide title to which you want to link and click OK. The high lighted text
should become un derlined and change color (based on the colors in the template
you are using).
Some of you tried to click on your text, and it didn’t take you any where.
That’s OK. As you know, PowerPoint has dif ferent views or modes in which
you can see your slides. We can edit our slides in Edit View (sometimes called
Normal View), but we run our presentation in Slide Show View. Our links will
only work in Slide Show View. Choose “View Show” from the Slide Show
menu to take you into Slide Show View (that’s the view where you only see your
slide on the screen with no menus or toolbars). Now you should be able to click
on your hy pertext link to take you to another slide. You’ll no tice that when you
point to a hy pertext link (or any el ement of PowerPoint on which you can click),
your cur sor changes from an arrow to a hand. Watch for that change in Slide
Show View so you can see what is clickable and what is not.
Once you have linked one part of a menu, it is easy to fol low the same steps
to link the rest of the items in the menu: High light the text you want linked,
choose “Hyperlink . . . ” from the In sert menu, choose “Doc u ment” or “Place in
This Doc u ment,” click on the plus sign or triangle if nec essary to see the ti tles of
your slides, click the ap propriate slide ti tle, and click OK.