Tip: Build a PowerPoint Hyperlink Table of Contents

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[Upbeat Music] From the beginning, PowerPoint was designed to be a linear storytelling tool. Start with slide one and go from slide to slide to slide but life rarely goes according to plan. And you should never be handcuffed to your presentation linear order. Let’s learn the fastest and the most artistic method to create a table of contents so that you can jump from any number of launching points within your presentation. It is slick, and it puts you in control. Hi, I’m Les from Power Up Training, where I bring my decades of corporate experience to you for free. Well, there are several old fashioned techniques to build a table of contents or agenda slide. This cool trick is only for PowerPoint 2016, up to the latest version of Office 365 for both the Mac and Windows PC, I’ll be starting by creating a new slide after the introduction slide. I’m gonna select a title only layout to give us some free working space. I’m gonna label it Table of Contents. Now, I’m going to add my major Table of Contents, slide hyperlink pointers. Note that the next steps only works on Windows computers. I’m gonna show you how to do the Mac technique in about 60 seconds. Let get me out of the way so we can focus on the desktop. In a Windows PC, just work in the normal view, and scroll down the thumbnail list on the left. Find the first table of contents slide, click and drag it onto the canvas. It does not matter where you drop it. We’ll fix the layout later. Scroll through the thumbnails on the left again, and pull in your second content entry. And continue on down. Don’t worry, dragging the left slide and dropping it onto the slide canvas area does not remove the original slide it just creates our hyper jump locations. Let me speed up and get all five onto our canvas. For our Mac user friends, we can’t do that drag and drop technique. Instead, we must work from the insert Ribbon Menu and click the drop down arrow for the zoom action icon. There you select zoom, and from there you can go through and find the slide that you want to drop into the table of contents.

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Repeat to add the others. Note that this technique will also work on Windows by I still like the drag and drop method we saw earlier. Hey, Windows users wake up. We’re now going to proceed the rest of the way together as friends for both Windows and Mac. We have all five hyperlinked Slides on the screen. But let’s reorganize them to get them to fit. For the first row. I’m going to roughly position them where I want the top three Slides but we quickly see that the individual hyperlink mini Slides are too big for our workspace. So here’s a trick to resize all of them and keep them exactly the same size. Use the lasso method to select by clicking outside the top left slide and dragging the selection down to the bottom right. Make sure you are outside and above all the objects before clicking, but do not include any other objects like the title. Now once you have confirmed that you’ve selected all the mini slide objects, look for the selector boxes on the corners of the Slides. Then go back to any one of the Slides and click the corner to drag and shrink the size. And they all follow along with identical dimensions. From sizing to alignment, to make them perfectly laid out once again starting with the top row. I’m going to place just two of the Slides where I want them the farthest left and the farthest right, I’m ignoring the middle slide. Now, for alignment magic. With the top three selected, we go to the Home Ribbon Menu, and then click the Action icon of Arrange going down to a line and we’ll start with a line top. And let’s go right back into Arrange menu and align and this time select distribute horizontal. This will place the middle slide exactly in the middle between the two outer book in many Slides. This row looks great. While we could use the same alignment tools for the bottom row, let’s look at another of PowerPoints latest helpers, SMART GUIDES. As you move objects around on the page. PowerPoints SMART GUIDES will pop up their red dotted lines which show if you are aligned to the middle or top or side The other objects on the page. They are subtle, but fast and easy guides. Just drag and look. One last week, oh five Slides now looked high on the page. So I’m gonna select them all, and move them down in unison. There we go. We’re now ready to test this out in our slideshow and see how our Table of Contents works. Here’s our title slide. And then our intro Summary page. And finally, our table of contents. Each and every one of these thumbnails are live links to a section of the presentation, we can jump to any new spot by just clicking. Also watch the cool graphic when I click in this slide zooms up to the right spot. We’re gonna go to specialized software

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And once there, I can advance my slideshow as normal slide to the next slide. Oh, that’s great. No, no, wait, wait, wait. We’re now stranded in the middle of our presentation, we need an escape route to return to the table of contents. Let me hit the Escape key on my keyboard. And then work on the Slides again. Here on this page, I’m going to add a hyperlink symbol to return back the Table of Contents. I’m going to go to insert and choose symbol. But you could drop in any object for this to work. I searched for “table of contents,” but nothing looks good. If I search for “book” I do find something like a table of contents from a book. Let me drop that in and relocate it to the bottom of the slide. At the moment, it’s just a plain object. To make it interactive, we’ve add a hyperlink back to our main table of contents slide. So with the objects selected, we go to insert and link and insert li it’s important that we select Place in document to see our slide pages here, I’m going to click Slide number three with the title of Table of Contents. And okay, now back to the slideshow to test it out. Title Page, summary page, back to our table of contents. Watch the slide zoom in when I click “Specialized.” And now we’re continue back through the Slides, Microsoft Project, Visio, Access database. And One Note, there is our special hyperlink object from inside our presentation, we can now move our mouse pointer on top and it switches to a finger indicating a clickable link. Click and back to our table of contents slide. Good job team. But But wait a minute, we think about this. We solved this only for a single slide. While we could go back and copy the icon with the hyperlink and paste it, we’d have to paste it on every single slide of this long presentation. There’s got to be a faster way. And there is it’s called Slide Master. Here at Power Up Training, we do have an in depth tutorial on this advanced tool. But basically, it’s a technique to make a single change once on the underlying framework and have it flow through all the Slides. Let’s do it. Go to View on the Ribbon Menu and Slide Master hold the underlying layout appear layout such as to contents or title and contents. At the very top of the list is the parent slide, which all the other layouts are based on, change it here and it’s going to ripple through everything. As we did for the OneNote slide, we’re going to insert an icon and then hyperlink it to the table of contents slide. I am going to zip through this because we’ve already gone through it earlier in this presentation. Take a look at how once placed in the parent master slide. It automatically shows up on all the children’s lies below. There we go. We’re finished. I need to show you how to get out of Slide Master View. Find the Slide Master Ribbon Menu. There at the end, there be Close Master View. Let’s go ahead and launch the slideshow. Title Slide, summary slide, and table of contents. This time, let’s jump to OWNERSHIP. And sure enough, our Table of Contents hyperlink is waiting to be clicked on the bottom of the existing slide. Still, there may be some issues. Let’s go back to OWNERSHIP again. And advance this show. Under licensing type. We see that the hyperlink icon is partially hidden. That’s because it is underneath the image layer. Still it is clickable. But what if it is completely covered up? If we go to the communication tool section of our presentation, we see some Slides have the icon based on the slide content and others have it missing completely. One solution is just to remember where the hyperlink icon is, and move your mouse to that spot. The finger link cursor will pop up and you can still jump to the table of contents, even though the icon is not visible.

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But if we’re building the slideshow for someone else, or we just want to be safe, here’s one of my many techniques. Let’s make the background of the slide transparent or see through on the offending slide. Go to the Design Ribbon Menu and look for Format Background. On the right side menu, find Transparency and slowly move the slider to the right. And you’ll see through the background to uncover the icon. On this slide, you might also want to consider doing the same Transparency concept with the communication tool blue box. If your presentation has a similar background, for all of the Slides, you could consider clicking Apply to All for the Transparency technique to ripple through all the pages. But But as always, make sure you have a copy of the presentation that you could fall back upon and use should you get some unexpected results. Finally, one last trick, and a gotcha mistake. Should your individual Table of Contents Slides not be obvious about the section topic, you could add text underneath the clickable mini Slides. Watch as I add two separate text boxes, and put in some text about those sets of Slides. And now watch how I positioned the first box right inside and on top of the mini slide. But for the second text box, I’m going to put it down and away from this slide. And while the first example looks tighter, it does cause issues as when I click the object in the slideshow, that text follows along at the bottom, and it looks messy. However, if I use this specialized link with the text is farther and out of the way, it looks cleaner when we jump to that section. So do be careful where you place those text labels. This is just one of many cool tricks in PowerPoint. And I have more to share. Should you want to learn more about the Slide Master tool. Look for this video tutorial. Or if you need to know more about the Zoom tool because there’s more customizations you can do to your table of contents. Look for this one to remember to subscribe and share and give me a thumbs up. Until next time, go power up