Invisible Linking in PowerPoint

By tolhz

Invisible Linking is a technique which allows you to hyperlink your presentation automatically. The traditional way of hyperlinking to specific slide, custom show, or even url is to add the hyperlink onto a button. Thus, once you click on the button, you will be transferred to the location. But what if you want to have this done automatically? Here's how it can be achieved:

1. First of all, remove the button as we don't need to have it there.

2. Instead, add a rectangle that covers the entire slide.

3. Double click on the rectangle, set fill color to 99%. Line color to no line.

4. Click OK.

5. Right click on the invisible autoshape, select Action Settings.

6. Select Mouse Over tab, set it Hyperlink to the Slide/URL/Custom Show etc.

7. To make the mouse over work, Click Add Effect > Entrance > Appear.

8. Set the Start from "On Click" to "After Previous".

9. Double click on the added effect.

10. Select Timing tab, set delay to 0.1 seconds or a time of your preference.

11. Click OK.

12. The last step is to ensure that your mouse pointer is visible at the point of the invisble linking. Depending on how your presentation has been set up, this step is optional if your mouse pointer shows up at the point of invisible linking.

There are several ways to achieve this:

Have the slide show running in Kiosk mode (Slide Show > Set Up Show > Browsed at kiosk) or,

Have the mouse pointer visible during slide show view (Right click in slide show, click Pointer Options > Arrow Options > Visible).

There are many other ways that you can make use of the invisble linking. For instance, this technique allows you to hyperlinking automatically from Presentation A to Presentation B's Custom Show either by a single click/ or not at all. Or perhpas, forcing an end show automatically (rather than looping the presentation) when running in kiosk mode.