Improve Navigation in Large Presentations (a tip, and requesting h

[Dawgma]

Hey.

So here's the situation. While presenting, sometimes your client/audience
will ask if they can see a previous slide once again. Or sometimes the
presenter would just like to have the ability to jump back and forth between
the main sections of the presentation. To do this people have usually
included arrows at the bottom corner of the presentation. Left and Right
arrows will hyperlink to "Next" and "Last Slide Viewed", and then a main menu
icon will hyperlink you back to the Agenda.

For the most part this is set-up quite functional. But now and then you
have to put together a large presentation where the Table of Contents
(agenda) is no longer straightforward. Instead the agenda slide is filled
with line after line of sub-menus. There are even sub-sub-menus... and it's
3 slides long! Just terrible... it becomes cluttered and confusing,
especially for your client who is seeing it for the first time. Also, it
becomes difficult or impossible to review and navigate to any particular
slide.

So I thought maybe a "flyout sub-menu" would be just the thing to ease
navigation for large presentations. Just add another icon to the bottom
corner with the rest of your navigation buttons for the fly-out menu. A
custom Master slide would need to be created for each major Section, because
of course each section has its own sub menus. On each master slide, copy
down the sub-menu items for each section, and put them off screen on the
right. Then create the on-screen icon so that when you click it the menu
items will move into the screen and over your current slide. Voila! You now
have easy access to any place in your current Section. (Also include an icon
to make the menu dissapear afterwards).

See this picture for an example:
http://img50.imageshack.us/img50/4732/flyoutexample6vb.jpg

So if you only need to go back a few slides in your current section, use the
flyout menu. If you need to switch to a different section entirely, use your
regular link back to the agenda. And now the agenda slide is a lot cleaner
(and only on 1 slide!) because you did not have to include all the sub-menus
with all their hyperlinks!

Great. There is just one problem... if you build the flyout menu on the
master slide, the menu will appear BEHIND all of the objects on your current
slide! If you want to make sure it appears on top, you would have to build a
flyout menu beside EVERY regular slide instead of just the master. which
is terrible idea because even if you had to add or subtract one item from
your agenda, you would have 30 slides to alter as well.. and 30 hyperlinks to
change! That's no good.

So I love the idea of this flyout menu.. but it is impractical to add it to
every regular slide. So I'm asking (and dear God hoping) that someone out
there may be able to suggest a solution to this... If somehow we can get
stuff from the Master Slide to appear ON TOP of the stuff from the regular
slide. That is the only solution that I can see. Otherwise... I'll just
have to scrap this wonderful idea. I just know this would improve the
usability of our large presentations enormously... too many times we have had
presenters get lost in presentations and have to exit out to powerpoint to
find the slide they want.

So if anyone can suggest how to make the flyout menu work, it would be much
appreaciated.

thanks!

art.

 

[Dawgma]

Image link:
http://img50.imageshack.us/img50/4732/flyoutexample6vb.jpg

 

[John Wilson]

Hi

Not sure if this would help but this bit of vba will paste the clipboard
contents onto every slide in a given range. If you ctrl click selected all
the elements of you fly in menu and copied them you could very quickly add
them to the range of slides of your choice.

Note there is no error trapping at all so use carefully

Sub paster()
Dim intbegin As Integer
Dim intend As Integer
intfrom = InputBox("From slide...?")
intto = InputBox("to slide...?")
For c = intbegin To intend
ActivePresentation.Slides(c).Shapes.Paste
Next c
End Sub

--
-----------------------------------------
Did that answer the question / help?
_____________________________
John Wilson
Microsoft Certified Office Specialist

 

[Dawgma]

Thanks.. but I'm sure that would still be too confusing for someone trying it
the first time (and there are a lot of people who will edit the presentation
to their own needs once or twice...)

I'm thinking the only solutions is to make sure the botton 1/4 of the screen
does not include ANY text or objects on the regular slides. then the flyout
menu can come from the bottom, and it will flyout over top of all the shapes