Inserting Hyperlinks and Action Buttons
A hyperlink allows you to go from the present slide to another slide, a Web page, or even a file. The hyperlink can be text or a picture. An action button is a ready-made button to insert into a presentation and define hyperlinks for.
Hyperlinks become active during a presentation. When you point to a hyperlink, the pointer shows a hand, indicating you can click on it. Text that represents a hyperlink is displayed underlined in a color that coordinates with your color scheme.
When you create a hyperlink to a page or file on a local file system, the hyperlink destination is represented by the path to the file, such as C:\Documents and Settings\myname\My Documents\file.xls. A hyperlink destination to something other than a slide is encoded as a URL (Uniform Resource Locator) such as http://www.microsoft.com/ or file://Computer Name/Shared Folder/FileName.htm.
Document Hyperlink
Practice: Creating a Hyperlink to a Slide in the Current Show
- Select the text or object that you want to represent the hyperlink. Go to Slide 9, the Summary Slide, and select the first bulleted item such as “NCS Departments” or whatever text you inserted for your presentation.
- Click Insert Hyperlink
on the toolbar. - The Insert Hyperlink dialog box opens. Under Link to, click Place in This Document. In the list, select the slide you want to go to as shown below and click OK.
The text color changes to the color for hyperlinks set up in the color scheme and the text is underlined. When you go to Slide Show View and hold down the Ctrl key while moving the mouse pointer over the hyperlink, it changes to a hand. If you click on the link with the left mouse button while holding down the Ctrl key, it takes you to that slide you indicated as the place to link to.
Once visited, the color of the link changes to whatever you indicated you wanted the color of visited links to be.
Web Page Hyperlink
Practice: Creating a Hyperlink to a File or Web Page
- Still on the Summary Slide, select the text of the second bulleted item “NCS Services” to represent the hyperlink.
- Click Insert Hyperlink.
- Under Link to, click Existing File or Web Page.
- You can type in the web site address if you know it or click on the magnifying glass over the world icon which opens the browser for you to search the web. That opens your browser where you can search for the site you want to link to such as NCS or your own department. Here type the address of the site you want such as http://ncs.ua.edu/services/index.html.
- Click on the ScreenTip button to insert a screen tip that appears when you roll over the link. See the dialog box for doing that below.
See the Screen tip that now appears when you view the slide in Slide Show view. Click on it and it connects you to the web page indicated, opening up the browser to display it.
By default, a hyperlink is automatically created when you type an e-mail or Internet address on a slide or outline. Remember that hyperlinks work only while a slide show presentation is running— not while you're working on your presentation in normal view or slide sorter view. On the View menu, select Slide Show to check its settings, select the hyperlink, and then on the Slide Show menu click Action Settings.
Insert an Action Button
Use action buttons when you want to include buttons with commonly understood symbols for going to the next, previous, first, and last slides. PowerPoint also has action buttons for playing movies or sounds.
Practice: Inserting an Action Button
- Select the slide you want to place a button on. In this case, you can put an action button on the Summary Slide to return to the first slide in the show.
- On the Slide Show menu, point to Action Buttons, and then select the button you want— for example, Home, Back or Previous, Forward or Next, Beginning, End, or Return. For this show, choose Home.
- Click the slide.
- Make sure that Hyperlink to is selected. Click OK to accept the proposed hyperlink in the Hyperlink to list, or click the arrow and select the link you want.
- Save your presentation and go on to the next section on Saving the Design Template.
Using this dialog box as indicated above, you can also add action settings, such as sound or highlighting, to emphasize hyperlinks.
To change the size of a button, drag the shape to the size you want. To maintain the shape's width-to-height ratio, hold down SHIFT as you drag one of the corner sizing handles.
Return to Course Topics or Creating a New Presentation Topics.