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We wrote this FAQ to answer the many questions we receive on this topic from our clients and other inquiring minds in the many electronic communities we frequent.
This FAQ is taken from Office 97 Annoyances (by Woody Leonhard, Lee Hudspeth, and T.J. Lee; ISBN 1-56592-310-3; O'Reilly and Associates). For additional information on this title, visit our site's page http://www.primeconsulting.com/annoyances/.
Click here to order Office 97 Annoyances from Amazon.
Q: I'm interested in how I can strategically use Office 97's new hyperlink feature with PowerPoint? Any ideas?
A: Probably the most common use of hyperlinks in PowerPoint is to quickly jump to a supporting document; it might be the details of an Annual Report in Word or a Cost of Goods Sold model in Excel. The downside is that if the PC running the presentation isn't connected to your company's network or doesn't have all the ancillary hyperlink destination files on the local disk (in the case of a remote presentation), the hyperlinks dead-end and can turn your dream promotion into a nightmare tongue-lashing from The Big Kahuna in the corner office.
PowerPoint's Action Settings feature provides a way to trigger hyperlinks that is unique, idiosyncratic, and under-powered. (Action Settings do provide the intriguing capability of triggering events other than hyperlinks, though; events like run a program, run a macro, act on an object, play a sound, or highlight upon receiving a click.) From Slide view, right-click an object, select Action Settings, and from there select either the Mouse Click tab or the Mouse Over tab.
Why would someone go to the trouble to configure an Action Setting triggered by a mouse click (one result being to activate a hyperlink) instead of simply creating a traditional hyperlink? Go figure. If you do pursue this technique-an Action Setting-and choose "Other File…" in the "Hyperlink to" list, you can only select a filename (there's no support for deep hyperlinks, say to a particular range or bookmark). However, setting up an Action Setting of the "Mouse Over" variety might be worthwhile since that way you can trigger a hyperlink when the user passes the mouse over that object. You can't do that with a typical hyperlink. The Office developers really missed a beat when they didn't have the Action Setting's "Other File…" option invoke the Insert Hyperlink dialog you see in PowerPoint's siblings. Instead you see a dialog entitled "Hyperlink to Other File" that looks more like a File Open dialog. This rough edge could have been more smoothly polished.
If you create a hyperlink in a PowerPoint slide, you can't activate the hyperlink while in Slide view by clicking on it. (You can activate it in Slide view by right-clicking it, selecting Hyperlink, Open.) Instead, you need to be in Slide Show view. This is by design, because PowerPoint slides are comprised of AutoShapes, and the correct behavior for clicking once on an AutoShape is to select it; double-clicking behavior is to fire up the Format AutoShape dialog.
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