hyperlink Archives | PowerPoint Tips Blog

Use PowerPoint to create buttons for slides or a website

June 3, 2013 by Ellen Finkelstein 3 Comments

Buttons are graphics that you click to go to another location (perhaps another slide or another presentation), buy a product, subscribe to a newsletter, and so on.

Most often, we think of buttons as being on a website, but you can put them in PowerPoint, too. When you put a button on a slide, you hyperlink it so that clicking it in Slide Show view takes you to another location. The concepts are similar. For more information about using hyperlinks in PowerPoint, see “Hyperlink to a specific slide in another presentation, or specific location in another file.”

You can use PowerPoint to create great buttons and I do this a lot.

Turn graphics into images

However you create the button, if you want to use it n a website, you’ll need to convert it to an image. You don’t need to do this step for a button that you hyperlink to another slide or presentation. I cover the procedure in my post, “Use PowerPoint as a graphics program.”

Once you create the image, you may have to resize it. It’s hard to tell in advance how big the button will be on a website. (You don’t have that problem when you use it on a slide.) A good guideline is to decide how big you want the text to be — such as 14 points — and then fit the button around the text.

What’s unique about a button?

Have you ever noticed that buttons look like they should be clicked? What is it about a button that lets you know you can click it to go somewhere or buy something? There are a few properties that many buttons have:

They have descriptive text
They look slightly 3D, raised from the surface
They stand out from the rest of the slide or web page–a different border and fill color or gradient

Many website buttons look different in different situations, such as when you hover over or click the button. Doing this is beyond the scope of this post, but if you know how to do it, you can create slightly different buttons and use them in this way.

6 steps to create a button

Creating a button gives you the opportunity to use many formatting features of PowerPoint. Each button will be different, but here are 6 general steps that you can use. I’ve provided some links to further details.

Insert a shape (I often like the rounded rectangle) and type the text that you want for the button. Bold text is usually best because it stands out more.
Make the outline thicker. On the Format tab, choose Shape Outline, Weight.
Change the fill color. On the Format tab, choose Shape Fill. You may also need to change the text color at this point so that it’s legible.
Add a bevel for a 3D look. See “Create professional-looking 3D effects with bevels.”
Add a shadow if you want. A shadow also gives a 3D appearance. See “Slides that pop! Using the 3rd dimension on a slide–Part I: Shadows.”
Add a highlight. A highlight makes the button look as if light is shining on it. See “Getting a shiny Web 2.0 look in PowerPoint-Part II: Highlights.”

Download some free buttons!

I have some free buttons that you can download in image format on my Change the World Marketing website. Feel free to use them! If you do Internet Marketing, I invite you to sign up for my Change the World Marketing newsletter while you’re there. Just click the button that says, “Click here to get your free master plan + tips.” And of course I made that button in PowerPoint.

Link to a specific PowerPoint 2003, 2007 or 2010 slide from Microsoft Word or Excel

June 14, 2012 by Ellen Finkelstein 36 Comments

In another tip, “Hyperlink to a specific slide in another presentation, or specific location in another file,” one of the topics I cover is how to create a hyperlink in PowerPoint that links to a specific location in Word or Excel. I also explain that you can link to a specific slide in another PowerPoint presentation by adding the # symbol, the slide number, a period, a space and the slide’s title.

Here’s an example.

As I note in that earlier tip, hyperlinking to another file is a great way to connect content that exists in more than 1 file. You might want to put a hyperlink in a report created in Word or a spreadsheet created in Excel that sends readers to a specific slide in a PowerPoint presentation.

Link from Word or Excel to PowerPoint

Suppose you want to link from Word or Excel to Slide 2 in a PowerPoint 2003, 2007 or 2010 presentation. If you try to create such a link, Word and Excel open the presentation in Normal view, not Slide Show view.

But if you create a Slide Show file and link to that, the hyperlink works; it opens the PowerPoint file in slide show view at the desired slide. A Slide Show is just a PowerPoint file that opens in Slide Show view.

Create a Slide Show

To create a Slide Show file, follow these steps:

Choose File (or Application button)> Save As.
From the Save as Type drop-down list, choose PowerPoint Show (*.ppsx or *.pps).
Specify the location at the top of the dialog box. I recommend that the presentation and the Word or Excel file be in the same folder, in case you need to move the files to another computer; then, the link should continue to work.
Click Save.

Add the hyperlink in Word or Excel

Now you’re ready to create the hyperlink in Word or Excel. Here are the steps:

Open the PowerPoint file and note the slide number to which you want to link. If you want to include the slide title in the hyperlink for your reference, note that too. Close the file.
In Word or Excel, add a hyperlink to some text or a shape by selecting it and choosing Insert> Hyperlink.
In the Insert Hyperlink dialog box, click the Existing File or Web Page button.
Navigate to the PowerPoint Show file and select it. You’ll see it in the dialog box’s Address text box. If there are spaces in the file name, you may see %20 in place of the spaces. %20 is HTML code for a space, so just leave it.
At the end of the file name in the Address box, add a # symbol, then the slide number. An example: sample%20makeovers.ppsx#2
If you want to add the slide title, add a period, space and the slide title. Tip: In the PowerPoint file, you can click the Outline tab in the left-hand pane and copy and paste the slide title from there. My link now looks like this: sample%20makeovers.ppsx#2. Tell ‘n’ showSM
Click OK.
Test your hyperlink. PowerPoint should open in Slide Show view to the slide you specified.

Nice, yes?

Thanks to a reader for asking the question in the older tip that lead to this technique. How will you find it useful?

How to use your remote to switch to another presentation in PowerPoint 2007 & 2010

November 14, 2011 by Ellen Finkelstein 6 Comments

A friend asked me, “How can I link to another presentation and use my remote to get to that presentation?”

Here’s the problem. You can easily link any shape to another presentation by hyperlinking it. I have instructions in my tip, “Link to other presentations and return to the original presentation.”

But to activate that hyperlink, you need to actually click the shape on the screen. This means that you need to go to your laptop, move your cursor onto the shape, and click.

What if you’re not close to your laptop and are using a remote to go from slide to slide? This is a common situation when you’re in a large room or just want to move around among the audience members.

The solution is not obvious at all, so here are the steps:

Choose Insert> Object. This opens the Insert Object dialog box.
Click Create From File. Then browse to, and open, the presentation. You’ll see an image of the presentation’s first slide.
Decide if you want the image to show. If it looks good and is a good indicator to the audience of what’s to come, leave it on the slide. Otherwise, select the icon and drag it off the slide.
Open the Animation pane. In PowerPoint 2007, choose Animations tab> Custom Animation. In PowerPoint 2010, choose Animations tab> Animation Pane.You might be wondering, why the Animation pane?
The image should still be selected. In 2007, click the Add Effect button> Object Actions> Show. In 2010, choose Add Animation> OLE Action Verbs> Show and click OK.

This puts the showing of the second presentation in the animation order. So when you click your remote, that presentation is displayed in Slide Show view. You can go through it and when it ends, you’re automatically back on the slide where you started.

If you know of a way to do this in PowerPoint 2003, please leave a comment! The options in 2003 are only Open and Edit, which don’t open the presentation in Slide Show view.

Using hyperlinks

September 5, 2001 by Ellen Finkelstein 18 Comments

Hyperlinks are a great way to connect your presentation to other slides, presentations, documents, and the Web. You can use hyperlinks for the following:

To enable you to jump to other slides quickly
To switch to another presentation
To open another file, such as a Word document or Excel spreadsheet
To display a Web page
To open an e-mail to someone

To create a hyperlink, select an object. It can be a shape, placeholder, or the text itself. If you select text, the text will have an underline and become the hyperlink color in the color scheme (theme colors). Then choose Insert> Hyperlink.

In the Insert Hyperlink dialog box, choose the type of link on the left:

Existing File or Web Page
Place in This Document
Create New Document
E-mail Address

Then locate the slide or file, enter the Web URL, or enter an e-mail address. Click OK.

Hyperlinks work only in Slide Show view. Always test your hyperlinks.

When you add a hyperlink to a presentation, you must be careful that the target of the hyperlink is available. If you are giving the presentation offsite using a laptop, all the targets need to be on the laptop as well, unless your laptop is actively connected to the Internet. An alternative is to copy Web site documents you think you will need to your laptop and hyperlink to those documents. The advantage is that you don’t have to depend on getting a good Internet connection at your offsite location.

Use timing, animation, or sound in a presentation with hyperlinks

July 18, 2001 by Ellen Finkelstein 12 Comments

The problem: If you create a timed presentation that automatically advanced after a certain number of seconds — usually done in a kiosk situation where viewers view the presentation on their own — and include hyperlinks to allow viewers to review the presentation, after they click a hyperlink to go backwards, the presentation stops advancing. Or animation doesn’t work/a sound doesn’t play the second time a slide is displayed.

Apparently, PowerPoint was designed so that if you hyperlink backwards to a slide that you’ve already viewed, automatic timing stops and animation/sounds don’t play.

The workaround: Create duplicates of each slide. Then set the timing for the first copy of each slide to 00:00. Because it’s an exact duplicate of the following slide, you don’t notice the duplication at all. (You might think that you wouldn’t see any slide set for 00:00 timing, but you actually see it for a split second, so if the slide is not an exact duplicate of the next slide, you’ll notice it.) Then hyperlink to the first slide of each pair of duplicates.

I found that the easiest way to do this is the following:

Complete the presentation, including the timings.
Click each slide (in the outline pane on the Slides tab or in slide sorter view). Press Ctrl+C to copy it, and immediately press Ctrl+V to paste it. You get a copy right after the original slide.
Select the first copy of each slide, choose Slide Show>Slide Transition, and change the timing to 00:00.
If you have added sound to any slide, remove the sound icon from the first copy of each slide (the 00:00 ones). You wouldn’t want the sound to start to play twice.
Create the hyperlinks. You can copy and paste them throughout the presentation. What’s important is that the hyperlinks link to the first copy of each slide, the one set for 00:00. Because it has no timing, PowerPoint won’t stop the timing when you hyperlink back to it.
If you use Action Buttons, set them for hyperlinks. Instead of setting them to Previous Slide or Next Slide, in the Hyperlink To drop-down list of the Action Settings dialog box, scroll down to Slide. Then choose the first copy of the previous or next slide.

If you later change a slide, be sure to delete its copy, copy and paste again to duplicate it, and change the first one’s timing.

If you use the Slide Numbering feature to number the slides, the numbers won’t be correct; instead you need to manually add text to indicate the slide numbers.