iWork '09: The Missing Manual

Setting Up Hyperlinks-Only Slideshows

Instead of feeding your presentation to your viewers with an automated slideshow, you can make the whole thing self-serve. In a hyperlinks-only slideshow, people help themselves to your presentation’s buffet, navigating through the slideshow at their own pace by clicking onscreen buttons to move from slide to slide.

You can’t simply turn a normal presentation into a hyperlinks-only presentation the way you can with a self-playing presentation. You have to plan ahead for this kind of slideshow when you design and create your slides, because hyperlinks-only presentations require you to provide one or more hyperlinks on every slide (see Linking to Slides).

Once you’ve created a slideshow containing hyperlinks on every slide, you can turn it into a hyperlinks-only presentation. Open the Document Inspector, click the Document tab, and choose “Hyperlinks only” from the Presentation pop-up menu.

Tip

If you’re creating a slideshow with “forward” and “back” buttons on every slide, give yourself a shortcut by adding those buttons to your master slides (you’ll learn about editing master slides on Modifying a Theme). Use arrow shapes as your buttons, for example, and add hyperlinks to each: In the Hyperlink Inspector, choose Slide from the “Link To” menu, and then pick “Next slide” or “Previous slide.”

In this kind of presentation, Keynote expects viewers to navigate with hyperlinks—the normal slide-advancing techniques and keyboard shortcuts don’t work. The ...