Download the source files

Video Transcript

Hey this is Bryan Jones from eLearningArt. Today I am going to show you how in PowerPoint you can link from any shape or picture to another place in your presentation or to an external resource. And I will give you the source files so you can actually follow along and see how I’ve set up the files. But let’s go ahead and get right into it. I will also give you a special bonus at the end if you stick around so hopefully will do that but let’s go ahead and do this.

Okay, so let’s say we have a design like this and we are looking to link out from each one of these icons or icon boxes. I will do two different examples. Let’s say that I want the link to be on this circle and I wanted it to go to a website. So all you need to do is you’re going to actually draw a new shape and I am going to hold shift to make that stay the same size – all right. Or actually it makes it a perfect circle.

Okay so the trick is that you are going to create a transparent shape over whatever it is you have and then you’re going to hyperlink out. So what I want to do is you can’t see but I right click format, shape, I pull this up, let’s go ahead and say No Line and then Solid Fill. You don’t want to do No Fill. You actually need to have a fill and then crank the transparency up to 100. And now you don’t even see that it’s there but it is.

Let’s go ahead and open the selection and visibility pane and I am going to name this “download hyperlink”, okay and it’s there. And so now with it selected I am going to do ctrl + K to pull up my hyperlink box. And if I wanted to go to a website I could just… well you can see a bunch of options, Existing File or Webpage let’s say www.e-learningart.com and I am going to select Okay.

So now if I go ahead and preview this presentation you will see if I click once I mouse over here, I mouse over this icon and it’s actually a hyperlink. And it pulls up the website. Okay, so great.

What if you don’t want the circle and what if you want actually do something within the same document? Let’s go ahead and do that. So you will see I have a bunch of different pages and what we will do when it skips not just to the downloads which is my next one but to websites.

So let’s actually do this one as a rectangle so I am going to grab that rectangle, same thing just kind of trace over here. And let’s right click Format Shape and we will say No Line, crank Transparency on the fill to 100%. Let’s pull up Selection Visibility. Again I would say, like, “website hyperlink”. It’s helpful to name these; it can get kind of messy when it just says like rectangle or oval.

So with that selected I am going to say do a ctrl + K for hyperlink and I’m going to say A Place In This Document and now it will show me the different slides that I have. And we want to go to slide 3 which is websites. I click Okay and let’s go ahead and preview this one so now I’m back in here you will see there is a website and here we have activated the hyperlink again.

We click on it. Boom! We go to websites so we could have a bunch of other resources here.

Anyways, that’s a way that you can add interactivity to your PowerPoint where you can link from one slide to another slide. You can link from one side to other resources such as websites, external websites. And it’s really easy to do and kind of a hidden feature of PowerPoint so hopefully you found that useful.

As I promised I do have a special bonus for you which you can download here or look in the show notes and I have recommended a few other videos as well if you want to check those out.

If you found this useful, please do me a favor and like the video if you’ve made it this far I really appreciate it if you could just do take another two seconds, like it. And if you want to see more videos like this go ahead and subscribe to the channel as well. Thanks so much and you have a wonderful day.