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

Con trol ling Nav i ga tion with Ki osk Mode
Now that you can create but tons and hyperlinks to take us ers where you
want them to go, you might not want them to go any where you don’t spec ify.
Normally in PowerPoint, a mouse click, the space bar, the right arrow, and the
Page Down key all move you to the next slide. If you have carefully planned
choices for the users, you don’t want them to mess that up by clicking and go ing
to the next slide. The so lution is Kiosk mode.
Choose “Set Up Show” from the Slide Show menu to get the di alog box
shown in Fig ure 2.13 (page 30). In this di alog box, click on “Browsed at a Ki osk
(full screen).” You now have complete con trol over the user. The only naviga-
tion key that will work when in Slide Show View is the Es cape key, which will
exit the show. This means that you must have but tons or hyperlinks to do any -
thing. You cannot rely on the user to click the mouse any where to advance to the
next slide because that will only work if the user clicks on a button.
One dif fi culty with Ki osk mode is an i ma tion. An i ma tion in PowerPoint
can be au tomatic or manual. Automatic animation works fine with Kiosk mode.
Manual animation does not. If the user has to click or hit the space bar to activate
animation (such as to have the next line of a bulleted list fly in from the left), this
will be blocked by Kiosk mode. The solution is to make all your animation
automatic.
Con trol ling Nav i ga tion with Ki osk Mode 29

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Fig ure 2.13. Se lect ing Ki osk Mode
If you choose to an imate text, whether or not you use Ki osk mode, you
should animate your navigation but tons as well. Have them ap pear on the screen
after all the text has ap peared. By do ing this, us ers won’t click a button to go to
another slide before all the text has shown up on the current slide.