{"id":3107,"date":"2012-05-31T09:39:00","date_gmt":"2012-05-31T08:39:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.mentor.com\/colinwalls\/?p=3107"},"modified":"2026-03-26T16:37:47","modified_gmt":"2026-03-26T20:37:47","slug":"powerpoint-hints-and-tips-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/2012\/05\/31\/powerpoint-hints-and-tips-3\/","title":{"rendered":"PowerPoint hints and tips #3"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>As I spend a lot of my time making presentations, I take some pride in doing what I hope is a good job. Well, at least I get good feedback quite often, so I know I am somewhat successful. There are many factors that contribute to a well executed presentation, but an area that seems to cause a lot of challenge is the use of PowerPoint. As I have done before [<a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.mentor.com\/colinwalls\/blog\/2012\/03\/22\/powerpoint-hints-and-tips-1\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">here<\/a> and <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.mentor.com\/colinwalls\/blog\/2012\/04\/26\/powerpoint-hints-and-tips-2\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">here<\/a>], I would like to share some more tips gleaned from my experience.<\/p>\n<p>This time I have two hints to make presentations a little bit smoother and hopefully avoid murder by PowerPoint &#8230;<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>There is a PowerPoint feature which, if used in a sensible way, can really improve the impression given to your audience: hyperlinks. These can broadly be used in three ways:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li>To link to other presentations &#8211; from an agenda slide, for example. This enables you to have complete control of what the audience is seeing, with no need to start\/stop PowerPoint or mess around finding presentation files. When the hyperlinked presentation finishes [either by coming to the end of hitting the ESC key], the display will return to the top level presentation [i.e. the agenda slide].<\/li>\n<li>To link to a website. If you are talking about some Web content and have an Internet connection, it may be useful to invoke the default browser directly from your presentation.<\/li>\n<li>To run another program. Maybe you want to run a demonstration of a software product during your presentation. Hyperlinking to the executable makes running the demo seamless.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>There are essentially two ways to make a hyperlink in PowerPoint:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>You can select some text, then right click on it and set up the hyperlink. The dialog is, I believe, quite straightforward. The drawback is that the resulting hyperlinked text is underlined [like on old-fashioned Web pages] and underlining is really bad. It significantly reduces readability. I am sure that there used to be a way to stop this underlining, but if it is possible now, I am unable to figure that out.<\/li>\n<li>You can right click on an object, which can be a graphic, a shape or even a text box and set up a hyperlink &#8211; this makes the entire object &#8220;hot&#8221;.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The second method can be used to enable textual hyperlinks without the underlining. Either you hyperlink the entire text box or you place a rectangular shape over the text that you want &#8220;live&#8221;, add a hyperlink to it, then make the shape borderless and transparent [do not make it &#8220;no fill&#8221;, just set transparency in the object Properties to 100%].<\/p>\n<p>This <a href=\"http:\/\/db.tt\/d8vvHxJQ\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">ZIP file<\/a> contains three PowerPoint files called A, B and C, which illustrate the use of hyperlinks. Just open A and hit F5 to present [or right click on the file and select Show]. There is just a single slide that hyperlinks to the other 2 presentations in the two ways that I described. Have a play.<\/p>\n<p>My second tip is much simpler, but can make presenting just a tiny bit simpler. How do you advance slides during a presentation? If you have a wireless remote controller, then you are sorted &#8211; that is the best way by far and those devices are a worthwhile investment. The zero cost way is to either left click on the mouse or hit a key on the keyboard. I do not favor the use of a mouse, as moving it can cause a distracting pointer to appear and an accidental right click is annoying. There are many keys on the keyboard to advance slides: right-arrow, down-arrow, ENTER and page-down are all options. However, I always use the SPACE key. Why? It is the biggest &#8220;target&#8221;, which means that hitting it accurately in a dimly lit room is straightforward. Stepping back a slide can also be done with a selection of keys &#8211; probably the best is BACKSPACE, as, again, that key is largest.<\/p>\n<p>If you have any good PowerPoint tips, please share them by comment or <a href=\"mailto:colin_walls@mentor.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">email<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As I spend a lot of my time making presentations, I take some pride in doing what I hope is&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":71677,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spanish_translation":"","french_translation":"","german_translation":"","italian_translation":"","polish_translation":"","japanese_translation":"","chinese_translation":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[302,451],"industry":[],"product":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-3107","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-off-topic","tag-powerpoint"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3107","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/71677"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3107"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3107\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10070,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3107\/revisions\/10070"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3107"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3107"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3107"},{"taxonomy":"industry","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/industry?post=3107"},{"taxonomy":"product","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/product?post=3107"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.sw.siemens.com\/embedded-software\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=3107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}