PowerPoint Action buttons are a handy tool for creating side trips within your presentation.
By Helen Bradley
While you might think of PowerPoint presentations as proceeding from the first slide to the last without interruption, that’s not always the best solution for your presentation needs. Just like traveling on side roads instead of zipping down the highway can make for a more interesting trip, so too is taking a more leisurely trip through your presentation and investigating issues in more depth when necessary. PowerPoint Action buttons are a handy tool for creating side trips within your presentation.
WHAT ARE ACTION BUTTONS?
Action buttons are a series of shapes which are created for you already in PowerPoint that you can select from a menu and insert onto a slide. When you insert an action button onto a slide, you then select the action that it performs when clicked. For example, if you select the Home Action button it is, by default, linked to the first slide (although you can alter this). So, when you come to a slide containing the Home action button you can click it to return to the first slide.
While this Home action button has limited use, there are others which are more powerful. For example, the Forward or Next and the Back or Previous action buttons move from one slide to the next or back one slide and can be used for slide show navigation. This would be appropriate for a show which is intended to be viewed by a user without a presenter being present and would make it easier for them to understand how to navigate the presentation. If you place these buttons on the Slide Master they appear automatically on all slides in the presentation thus providing you with a way to create navigation options on all slides. To complete your set of navigation links add the Action buttons for Beginning and End which move to either end of the presentation.
SLIDE SHOW NAVIGATION BAR
To see this in action (pun definitely intended), open a PowerPoint show and choose View, Master, Slide Master to display your slide master. Add the action buttons by choosing Slide Show, Action Buttons and choose Action Button: Back or Previous. Drag to create the shape on your slide and then, from the Action Settings dialog that appears, click Ok to accept the default setting which is to move back one slide. You can then add the other three ‘typical’ navigation buttons Forward or Next, Beginning and End. For each, you can select the default action. Close the slide master and then test the show and the embedded action buttons to see that they truly do move you in the promised directions.
One word of warning, however. If there is something on a slide which is placed over the action buttons on the Slide Master you won’t be able to click them because the slide master elements are on a layer below the elements on the slide itself. When they’re hidden underneath an object on a higher layer, the action buttons can’t be selected. So, it’s best to add the Action buttons for navigation before you start creating your show so you know where they will be positioned and you can keep the other elements on the slide out of their way. You will see shortly how you can make good use of this layering behavior when you actually want to disable a button.
OTHER ACTIONS
There are a couple of handy Action buttons you can use to add a detour or side trip into your presentation. For example, consider the situation where you have a slide which covers a detailed topic and you want the option of showing more information if necessary at that point in the presentation. Create a slide with this additional information and hide it (right click on its thumbnail and choose Hide Slide). Now, move to the slide that contains the detailed information and add the Action Button: Information to it. When you do this, a button showing the typical lower case ‘i’ indicating more information is available appears on the slide. This action button’s default setting is None so you should, instead, choose Hyperlink to and then choose Slide… from the dropdown list and select the hidden slide containing the extra information. Click Ok.
Now, when you’re making your presentation and if time permits and the audience needs it, you can click the Information action button to display the hidden slide which contains more information. When you do this, you’ll see that, so far, we’ve only created half the solution – there’s no way to easily return to where we came from.
The solution to this is the Action Button: Return – this returns to the slide that you were last viewing. So, display the hidden slide in the editing area and add the Action Button: Return button to it and confirm its default setting. Now, when you play your presentation, click the Information action button to display the hidden slide. When you’re done, click the Return action button to return to the slide you were looking at and continue your presentation.
This process of hiding a slide with a Return button already in place in it is a good way of providing help to your user for a presentation that they run themselves. You can add the Action Button: Help to your navigation buttons on the slide master and a user can click it from any slide to view a hidden slide of helpful information that you’ve created for them. When they are done they will click the Return button to return to where they were in the presentation.
This is a situation where you can take advantage of your ability to layer objects on a slide – so place the Return action button over the top of the Help action button on the hidden slide only. Then the help button will be invisible and inoperable on the hidden slide – which makes sense since this slide is the help slide. The return button placed over the top of the help button is the one that will work when the user clicks it.
ACTION ANYTHING
You’re not limited to using PowerPoint’s built in action buttons and you can, instead, use any AutoShape and even clip art and other images as action buttons. Add the shape or clip art to the slide then right click it and choose Action Settings from the menu to access all the available action options. When doing this, ensure that your image or shape is identifiable as something that can be clicked particularly if you’re expecting a user on their own to find and click the button.
You’re also not limited to accessing PowerPoint slides as a result of clicking an action button. You can link action buttons to other things including Word documents and Excel worksheets. So, in a presentation, you could display a picture of an Excel chart on the slide and add an action button linked to the original data that you can display if necessary by simply clicking on the button.
If you disable the ability to move forward from one slide to anther using a mouse click from the Slide Transition task pane, you can potentially control very accurately how a user progresses through a presentation using action buttons. You can offer multiple paths to be chosen by the user or which they access by answering a question – depending on their answer they’ll be diverted to different slides or returned to the slide containing the information they clearly have not yet understood.
