Hyperlink to another file

[Kathy]

Presentation A links to Slide 7 in Presentation B. Someone inserts a slide
after slide 4 in Presentation B. My hyperlink in Presentation A is now wrong
and has to be corrected manually. How can I set the hyperlink so that it
stays correct even if the slide number changes? This is a simple example, but
Presentation A actually links to 4 other slides and has hundred's of
hyperlinks that constantly need to be changed. Any help is appreciated.

 

[Cosmo]

I don't think there's any way to keep this from happening. The hyperlink
specifies a slide by slide number, not a specific slide.

If you know how to write code in VBA, you could name the slides in
Presentation B and then create a program to loop through the hyperlinks in
Presentation A and search for the slide by name in Presentation B and relink.

 

[Ute Simon]

Does "slide 7" in "presentation B" have a slide title that has been entered
in the title placeholder? If so, the hyperlink does not link to a number,
but to this title. If there is no slide title, hyperlinks may break. If you
do not want to see the title on your slide, you can move the placeholder off
the slide area.

Best regards,
Ute

 

[Cosmo]

Text entered into the title placeholder doesn't matter in external
presentations (or, at least it doesn't for me in PPT2007). It links to
whatever slide number was set in the hyperlink. If a hyperlink goes to slide
7 in Presentation B, and another slide is added before that slide, it will
link to the new slide 7.

 

[Cosmo]

The VBA solution probably wouldn't be too tricky, just need 2 macros - one
which loops through all of the hyperlinks in the active presentation, grabs
the slideID from the linked file, and adds a tag to the slide object which
has the hyperlink to hold the slideID. The second would loop through the
hyperlinks, pull the slideID from the tag, and retrieve the current
slideNumber to relink the hyperlink. All of this could be in a simple add-in.

The only problem with this, is that it won't automatically keep the
hyperlinks updated - you'll have to run the second macro each time slides are
added/deleted. So if a client adds/deletes slides after the fact, then you
will still have the original problem. But if you really have hundreds of
links that need to be updated regularly, this could be a huge timesaver.

 

[Cosmo]

It'd get a little trickier than that because there might be multiple hyperlinks on a
single slide or even within a single shape. You could track that via tags that
point to the ordinal number of the hyperlink w/in the hyperlinks collection, but
then everything goes pearshaped if the user adds or removes hyperlinks.

Tags on individual shapes that hold the hyperlinks would solve half the problem but
you'd still need to deal with a single shape, multiple hyperlinks applied to
different text ranges w/in the shape's textframe.

But if the user's not using links applied to text, then tag the shapes and you're
good to go.

Ah, yes, I had forgotten that there could be multiple hyperlinks to a shape
(I mostly work with hyperlinks on button objects, where there would only be
one per shape.) It would be great if Microsoft would allow tags for ALL
objects. I know I've been bitten long ago before where I wanted to apply a
tag to something that I couldn't (might have even been a hypelink)

 

[Larry C]

I wouldn't know VBA if I ran over it, but I do link from one presentation to
others and have hundreds of these links. It's actually quite simple to
solve the problem you've described. It is very important that you set your
link up properly though which I'll describe below. While the problem you
have I can solve for you, the problem you will still have is if someone
"updates" slide 7 by deleting it and replacing it with an updated version.
As soon as they delete slide 7 the link is broken regardless of the fact
that they replace it with a similar looking slide 7. In fact, even if they
cut/paste the exact same slide 7 it will still break the link.

The easiest way to practice this is to open Presentation A and Presentatin B
side-by-side. Be sure the slide sorter view is open. In Presentation B,
select the slide from the slide sorter pane that you want to link to. It's
important you select the slide from the slide sorter pane. Copy it (right
click/copy or CTRL-C, etc). Now go to Presentation A and create a blank
slide where you want the linked slide to appear. Click on the blank slide,
i.e. not the slide sorter pane this time, but on the slide itself. Now go
up to Edit/Paste Special/Paste Link/Microsoft PowerPoint Slide Object/OK.
You can resize the linked slide to fill up the whole page.

You've now linked a slide in Presentation A to the slide in Presentation B.
While you still have both presentations open make a change to the slide in
Presentation B. Then on the linked slide in Presentation A
right-click/Update Link. You'll see your change is now in Presentation A
too. Practice further by adding a slide in Presentation B in front of the
slide you linked to. You will notice that it doesn't impact your
Presentation A link at all. Now delete the extra slide and again no impact
to Presentation A.

When you open Presentation A you have to select the option to update links.
Links are terribly slow to update, but it does work. I have a "master"
presentation that I update manually then I have a dozen other presentations
for various purposes that are just links back to the master.

Larry