Did you know that you can have internal links within a PowerPoint and can click on that link and get to another page within that same PowerPoint?? That they do not have to be viewed LINEARLY, page-by-page, click-by-click? Wait? You didn’t know that? Well come on in… let’s talk some more…
Many times, PowerPoints can be more than 20 pages or more, with some averaging about 40-60 pages. My largest PowerPoint was 180 pages. Now let’s think about this for a moment. There are two ways this will possibly be viewed:
1) Showing the presentation
2) Providing it to an end-user to view themselves
If you are showing the presentation, and you’d like to hop around the presentation in a super-slick manner, having internal links to specific categories or sections is the best way to navigate a large PowerPoint. Think of it like a localized web site. If you pass it along to an end-user to view, they can click around, just like a web site. How cool! Let’s look at some examples.
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Horizons Media — San Diego, CA. Not only is this PowerPoint very bold in style and color, it has many pages and needed to be organized in an easy-to-use manner.
Each “title” section had it’s own sub-sections. In the above example, the Expertise shows four links that you can click onto to get to that page, instead of using the mouse or clicker.
The “Case Study” section has three main categories to show-off: web, branding and print support. The clear, well-colored and large internal links are obvious to the user, remind the of a web link and makes it intuitive to click on. When they click on “branding” they suddenly are brought to another page, about 6 pages into the presentation, and they can look at that section. And if they want to go back to the previous section, they simple click that link and they go back. But they do not know what page they are on — they are just moving about. Enjoying the ride. With a PowerPoint? Really? YES!
Once you are within a sub-category, you can go even more specific. In this slide, you can see those small golden/green links under the words “Case Studies.” Those are links to even more detail. See where this is going? Now look at this next slide…
Oh no wait! This IS the actual web site for Horizons Media. My mistake. But hey, with the things you can do with internal linking within PowerPoints, you would never know the difference, would you?
