PowerPoint 2007: The Missing Manual

Chapter 12. Make Your Slides Clickable

If you’ve seen a few PowerPoint presentations, you’ve probably noticed a handful of semi-transparent buttons in the lower-left corner of each slide. These optional buttons let whoever’s running the slideshow advance to the next slide, back up to the previous slide, and perform a few other basic navigational actions. These predesigned interactive elements are fine for basic slideshow navigation, but PowerPoint doesn’t stop there. The program also lets you add your own interactive elements: links and actions.

• Links. PowerPoint gives you a quick way to create five common types of links: a link from a slide in your slideshow to another slide in the same slideshow, to another slide in another slideshow, to a Web page, or to just about any other type of document. You can even set up links that automatically start the process of sending an email. After you’ve created a link, you can edit it to add sound, to highlight it when it’s clicked, or even to change what the link links to.

• Actions. An action is a souped-up link. In addition to displaying slides and Web pages, you can create actions that launch non-PowerPoint programs, run macros (see Chapter 14), or run object actions. As Chapter 9 explains, you can insert objects into your slides, some of which come with prebuilt commands—called actions. If you like, you can tell PowerPoint to play a sound or highlight the action image when the action is clicked or moused over.

Note

Because so many folks are ...