Ms Office Tune Up

When you put together your presentation, part of your preparation should always involve anticipating possible audience questions, comments, or concerns. This enables you to pro­vide quick and accurate responses, which impresses a lot of people and enhances the overall message of your presentation.

Most of the time, you can write down possible questions, answers, and other material in the notes pages of your slides. However, you might think of an audience question that requires a more formal response in the form of a separate slide. The only problem is that you don’t want to include that slide in your presentation because the question or comment that leads to it might never come up. The solution is to include the slide in the presentation anyway but mark it as hidden. This means that the slide doesn’t display in your slide show and doesn’t print in your handouts.

TIP

If you want to print your hidden slides, choose Office, Print to display the Print dialog box. Click to activate the Print Hidden Slides check box and then click OK.

To hide a slide, select it in the Normal or Slide Sorter view and then choose Slide Show, Hide Slide. PowerPoint lets you know a slide is hidden by displaying a rectangle with a diagonal slash behind the slide number. (In Normal view, a hidden slide looks as if it is washed out in the Slides tab.)

How do you view a hidden slide when you need it? PowerPoint gives you two methods:

• Display the Slide Show menu, choose Go to Slide, and then click the hidden slide. Note that in the list of slides the hidden slide displays with parentheses around its slide number. For example, a slide might normally display in the list as 12 Review, but if you hide the slide it displays as (12) Review.
• Set up a hyperlink or action button that, when clicked, takes you to the hidden slide.

If you want to configure some text in one of your slides as a hyperlink that takes you to the hidden slide, follow these steps:

1. Select the text you want to use as a link.
2. Choose Insert, Hyperlink (or press Ctrl+K) to display the Insert Hyperlink dialog box.
3. Click Place in This Document. PowerPoint displays the Select a place in this docu­ment list, which consists of the slides in the presentation, including your hidden slide (which displays with parentheses around its slide number).
4. Click the hidden slide to which you want to link, as shown in Figure 1.
5. Click OK.

Figure 1 Use the Insert Hyperlink dialog box to set up a text link to your hidden slide.

If you don’t want a link to appear in your presentation text, you can create a separate action button instead. An action button is a small graphic image that you configure to run a par­ticular action when clicked. In this case, you want the action button to display your hidden slide. Here are the steps to follow:

1. Display the slide on which you want to display the action button.
2. Choose Insert, Shapes to display the Shapes gallery and then click an icon in the Action Buttons section. (It doesn’t matter which one you choose, but one of the button icons might be more appropriate for your needs. For example, if your hidden slide anticipates a possible question, then you should use the Help button, which comes with a question mark (?) icon.)
3. Click and drag your mouse on the slide to create the action button. When you release the mouse button, PowerPoint displays the Action Settings dialog box.
4. Click the Hyperlink To option.
5. In the list under the Hyperlink To option, click Slide. PowerPoint displays the Hyperlink to Slide dialog box.
6. Click your hidden slide and then click OK. The name of the slide displays in the Action Settings dialog box, as shown in Figure 2.
7. Click OK.

Figure 2 Use the Action Settings dialog box to set up an action button to link to your hidden slide.

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