Have you ever needed to link your PowerPoint presentation to another? What if you could link it to a specific slide in another presentation? What if you could also link it to a Word or Excel document (and specify exactly which part of the document you want to open)? Well, it can be done and I’ll show you how in this post.
To get started, you need a PowerPoint presentation as well as another file that you want to link to. In this example, we will link two PowerPoint presentations together and go directly to slide 2 in the second presentation.
Link multiple PowerPoint presentations
Step 1: Find or create the object you want for your link. It can be an image, clipart, text, etc. Select this object and click the “Hyperlink” button on the “Insert” tab. This should work fine in Office 2007, 2010 and 2013.
Step 2: Now the hyperlink dialog box has opened, locate and locate the file you want to link to. Click once to select the file, but do not close the dialog as there is one more step to be taken.
Note. If you are done at this point, you will simply link to the entire presentation or document, not to a specific location in that document.
Step 3: Click the Bookmark button located on the right side of the dialog box. This button will open another window where you can select where you want to go in the linked document.
If you link to a PowerPoint presentation, it will display all the different slides. Select the desired location in the presentation and click OK.
Step 4. Click the appropriate buttons to close and save the changes you just made.
Step 5. Check the link to make sure it works correctly. Note. Hyperlinks in PowerPoint only work in slideshow mode.
This feature can be very useful if you want to use part of another presentation in your own, but do not want the presentation to drag out. It’s also useful if you want to adapt your presentation to different audiences.
For some audiences, you can view the presentation without clicking on the hyperlink, but others may need more information, so you click the hyperlink and show them more information.
It’s also worth noting that when you switch to another slide in another presentation, all slides after the linked slide that are in the second presentation will be shown before moving back to the next slide in the original presentation.
Link PowerPoint to Word or Excel
Unfortunately, the process of linking to a Word bookmark or Excel named range is not that easy. If you follow the steps above and select the Word file and then click Bookmark, you will receive the following error message:
Microsoft PowerPoint could not open this file or parse this file type.
So what do you do now? Well, you need to manually enter the bookmark name or named range after the path in the address field.
First select the file, then add the # symbol and the name of the bookmark to the end. Click OK and then check the link to make sure it works. If you don’t know how to create bookmarks in Word, all you have to do is select any place in your Word document, then go to the Insert tab and click Bookmark.
Give your bookmark a name and that’s it. When you click a link in a PowerPoint presentation, Word opens to the exact bookmark location in the document.
In Excel, select the cells and then type a name in the small box that shows the cell numbers and press Enter.
When you click on the link, Excel will open and the entire range will be automatically selected so you don’t have to search for it.
In general, the hyperlink function is very useful if you have a presentation that would be complemented by links to data or supporting documents. If you have any questions, please leave a comment. Enjoy!
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