Adding Action Buttons to User-Interactive Shows

Adding Action Buttons to User -Interactive Shows

You can create slide show presentations that will be played on a computer where your audience actually interacts with the slide show (for example, a computer at a trade show that tells potential customers about your company). This means that you need to give the audience some means of controlling the show. You can simply provide access to a keyboard and/or mouse and let the user control the show in the same way you learned earlier in this lesson, or you can provide action buttons onscreen that make it easy to jump to specific slides.

Action buttons are like controls on an audio CD player; they enable you to jump to any slide quickly, to go backward, to go forward, or even to stop the presentation.

graphics/tip_icon.gif

The Same Controls on All Slides? If you want to add the same action buttons to all slides in the presentation, add the action buttons to the Slide Master. To display the Slide Master, select View , point at Master , and then choose Slide Master .


To add an action button to a slide, follow these steps:

  1. Display the slide in Normal view.

  2. Select Slide Show , point at Action Buttons , and pick a button from the palette that appears. For example, if you want to create a button that advances to the next slide, you might choose the button with the arrow pointing to the right.

    graphics/tip_icon.gif

    Which Button Should I Choose? Consider the action that you want the button to perform, and then pick a button picture that matches it well. To change the button picture, you must delete the button and create a new one.


  3. Your mouse pointer turns into a crosshair. Drag to draw a box on the slide where you want the button to appear. (You can resize it later if you want.) PowerPoint draws the button on the slide and opens the Action Settings dialog box (see Figure 12.7).

    Figure 12.7. Set the action for your button in the Action Settings dialog box.

    graphics/104fig07.jpg

  4. Select either the Mouse Click tab or Mouse Over tab to set the action for the button (Mouse Click options require a click; Mouse Over requires only that the mouse pointer be placed on the button).

  5. Choose the type of action you want to happen when the user clicks the button. Click the Hyperlink To drop-down list and select an action such as Next Slide .

  6. (Optional) If you want a sound to play when the user clicks the button, select the Play Sound check box and choose a sound from the drop-down list.

  7. Click OK . Your button appears on the slide.

  8. View the presentation (as you learned at the beginning of this lesson) to try out the button.

If you do use buttons on your slides so that users can run the slide show, be sure you use the same style of button on each of your slides for a particular action. This kind of consistency gives the viewer of the presentation a feeling of comfort and control.

graphics/tip_icon.gif

Buttons Can Do Many Things You can also create action buttons that run a program or run a macro that has been created using the Visual Basic for Applications programming language. Although these are very advanced features not covered in this book, keep in mind as you learn more about PowerPoint that many possibilities exist for making very creative and complex slide show presentations.




Microsoft Office 2003 All-in-One
Microsoft Office 2003 All-in-One
ISBN: B005HKSHB2
EAN: N/A
Year: 2002
Pages: 660
Authors: Joe Habraken

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net