Unpredictable behavior with hyperlinks/action settings

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rm_ugroup

I am using PowerPoint 2000.

I have a series of 4 screens that contain hyperlinks to simulate
buttons being being pressed to bring up information on the page (I
don't see any other way of doing this).

Screen 8: All 3 buttons in "up" position. Button 1 goes to screen 9,
button 2 goes to screen 10, button 3 goes to screen 11.
Screen 9: Button 1 is in "down" position. Button 2 goes to screen 10,
button 3 goes to screen 11.
Screen 10: Button 2 is in "down" position. Button 1 goes to screen 9,
button 3 goes to screen 11.
Screen 11: Button 3 is in "down" position. Button 1 goes to screen 9,
button 2 goes to screen 10.

The hyperlinked objects are transparent rectangles on top of the
"buttons" because each button consists of a group of drawing objects
plus text (I couldn't find a built-in shape that looked the way I
wanted it to).

When I run this series (actually, I have two sets of these in the
presentation, one with three buttons and the other with four), it seems
to work fine, and then suddenly, one of the buttons will go to screen 5
instead of screen specified in the hyperlink. Different buttons on
different screens stop do this unpredictably, but they ALWAYS go to
screen 5. I cannot find any hyperlink to screen 5 and cannot fathom why
it keeps going there. I have made sure that the hyperlinked transparent
object is always in the uppermost layer.

The same thing happens with the second set, which is pages 25-29. At
any one time, one of the buttons will send me back to page 5.

The presentation is not huge - only about 36 screens.

I'm going nuts. Any ideas how I can find out what the deal is with
screen 5?
 
I've figured out why it's going to that one particular screen. One of
the objects in the "button" group has a hyperlink to that screen. I had
to ungroup the object and look at each element individually to find
that out. Is there another way?

However, I still don't know why the transparent object on the frontmost
layer (with the correct hyperlink) doesn't override anything that's
associated with objects underneath it. It usually does, but not
consistently.
 
One possible solution is to make the "transparent" object only 99%
transparent. In some systems, 100% transparent objects are ignored. Since
you are using PowerPoint 2000, you can't use trigger animations, so you
seem to have two choices for this: doing it the way you are doing it, or
hiding and showing objects with VBA. For me, the VBA method would be
easier, but if you don't know VBA, then doing what you are doing is
probably the easiest thing. Of course, it depends how many times you have
to do this.
--David

--
David M. Marcovitz
Microsoft PowerPoint MVP
Director of Graduate Programs in Educational Technology
Loyola College in Maryland
Author of _Powerful PowerPoint for Educators_
http://www.PowerfulPowerPoint.com/
 
How many links total do you figure there are in your presentation?
How wordy are your slide titles?

PPT has a limited amount of storage available for links and the titles of the
linked-to slides count against that chunk of available data.

If your presentation exceeds the limit, the links can start misbehaving.
 
Thank you. I had a hunch that maybe transparent objects really are
"transparent" -- they even let the cursor through! Sometimes I am able
to select the objects underneath when in edit mode.

I have redesigned those pages now so I am just using one object for the
button, instead of the grouped object, so I don't need the transparent
overlay anymore. I'll keep in mind your suggestion about transparent
objects though next time around.
 
Thanks for your reply. I have the two sequences I mentioned. The first
has four pages, with three links per page (to each other) and the
second has five pages with four links per page. I don't think I reached
any of the capacity limits because the presentation is just not that
big, but is there a way to see these statistics?

And is there a way to see all the links in the presentation or on one
slide? As I mentioned, I did discover that I had a rogue link on one of
the grouped objects, which was causing it to keep going to that page.
However, I had to find it by ungrouping the object and looking at the
properties of each element separately.
 
Thanks for your reply. I have the two sequences I mentioned. The first
has four pages, with three links per page (to each other) and the
second has five pages with four links per page. I don't think I reached
any of the capacity limits because the presentation is just not that
big, but is there a way to see these statistics?
Click to expand...

If that's all there is to it, I'd say you're nowhere close to maxing out, but ...
And is there a way to see all the links in the presentation or on one
slide?
Click to expand...

Yes, and it gives you a best-guess at the amount of link space used as well.

The free demo of our PPTools FixLinks (http://www.pptools.com/fixlinks/) includes
a report function that'll give you this info. No time limit, no obligation to
buy anything, use it in good health, etc.
 
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