Navigating Through a Presentation
PowerPoint presents myriad ways to navigate in a presentation.
Mouse and Keyboard Shortcuts
In addition to the navigation methods you've probably used (left mouse button to advance, Backspace key to back up, Esc to end), PowerPoint also supports a wide variety of mouse and keyboard shortcuts:
To advance from one slide to another, or perform the next animation on the current slide, you can click the left mouse button—but you can also press Enter, N (for Next), page down, right arrow, down arrow, or the spacebar. You can also right-click the screen during a presentation and choose Next.
To move to the previous slide, or activate the preceding animation on the current slide, you can press Backspace—but you can also try P (for Previous), page up, left arrow, or the up arrow. Or you can right-click the screen and choose Previous.
To end a presentation, in addition to the Esc key, you can right-click and choose End Show.
An almost-complete list of navigation controls is available by right-clicking the screen during a presentation and choosing Help, by pressing F1, or by referring to the Help topic "Slide Show Controls." Most of the controls are obscure, but a few might be worth memorizing:
B (for Black) or pressing the period key toggles between displaying a black screen and showing the current slide
Similarly, W (for white) or pressing the comma key toggles a white screen
Tab cycles among all the hyperlinks on a slide
This doesn't appear to be documented anywhere, but pressing the Home key during a presentation returns you to the first slide.
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Similarly (and this one doesn't appear to be documented anywhere, either), pressing the End key sends you to the final slide.
Using Hyperlinks
Hyperlinks allow you to turn text, graphics, pictures, or almost anything else on a slide, into a "hot" link. Those hot links can point just about anywhere—a specific slide, the first or last slide in a presentation, the next or previous slides, files (whether on the local hard drive, or accessible through the network), specific locations inside Word documents or Excel workbooks, and much more. As shown previously in Figure 28.14, you can even link to a custom show within the current presentation, by using the Bookmark button in the Insert Hyperlink dialog box.
If the PC you're using for the presentation is connected to the Web (or if the presentation itself is on the Web), hyperlinks can also connect to Web pages.
The easiest way to establish a hyperlink is to start by selecting whatever you want to hyperlink from (that is, the text, drawing, picture, and so on, that will be "hot" during the presentation), and then click the Hyperlink icon on the Standard toolbar. That brings up the Insert Hyperlink dialog box shown in Figure 28.16.
Figure 28.16. Specify the location you want to hyperlink to.
The problem with hyperlinking to an object that requires another application, of course, is how to hyperlink back to the point in your presentation where you left. If you hyperlink out to an object that requires a program other than PowerPoint—to a Web page, say, or a Word document—when you close that program, PowerPoint is still there, with the "linked from" slide still visible.
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If you hyperlink to an entire PowerPoint presentation, you can run through that presentation and, when it's done, you are back where you started, at the "link from" slide.
Advanced Navigation with Action Settings
Action Settings are an older variation on Hyperlinks that let you link to a few unusual locations in a presentation—in particular, the "previously viewed" (or "linked from") slide. Action Settings also let you start a program, run a macro, and/or combine sounds with all the preceding.
If you want to be able to "jump back" to the previously viewed slide, your best bet is to set up an Action Button (see next section) with an Action Setting that moves to the previously viewed slide. Action Settings allow you to navigate in powerful ways that aren't possible with hyperlinks.
To open the Action Settings dialog box (see Figure 28.17), select the text or graphic you want to make "hot," and then click Slide Show, Action Settings.
Figure 28.17. Action Settings provide the only (easy) way to return to the previously viewed slide.
Note that you can specify separate actions for a mouse over—where you move the mouse pointer over the "hot" area—and for a mouse click.
Navigation Shorthand with Action Buttons
PowerPoint makes some kinds of hyperlinking easy by attaching predefined hyperlinking information to a group of AutoShapes called Action Buttons.
If you want to add a button that allows you to immediately move to the end of the presentation, use an Action Button. If you're creating a presentation for the Web and want to create your own Next Slide and Previous Slide buttons, instead of relying on PowerPoint's built-in navi gation bar, Action Buttons make it easy.
To place an Action Button on a slide, select the slide and, on the Drawing toolbar, choose AutoShapes, Action Buttons. (Equivalently, you can choose Slide Show, Action Buttons.) The buttons look just like AutoShapes (see Figure 28.18).
Figure 28.18. Predefined Action Buttons cover many of the common hyperlinking bases.
Several of the Action Buttons (for example, the question mark, information sign, video camera) don't hyperlink to anything in particular; they just put the picture on the slide and bring up the Action Settings dialog box.
Most of the Action Buttons, however, have predefined actions associated with them. You can insert buttons on your slides to move to the first or last slide in the presentation, to go to the next or previous slide, or to return to the last viewed slide.