Hyperlinks to specific Excel worksheet doesn't work on Mac?

[Mark]

I've posted this in the PPT message board, figured I'd post it into
the Mac PPT board as well in case anyone here has any insight.

I need to set a hyperlink in a PowerPoint presentation to a specific
worksheet in an external Excel document (there will be as many as 30
or so worksheets), and I can't get the hyperlink to work on a Mac. The
following works on a PC:

ExcelFileName.xls#'WorksheetName'!A1

But no matter what I try to do on a Mac, the Excel document always
opens to the first worksheet. (I tried setting a hyperlink in Word as
a test, and that didn't work either) There will be links to all of the
worksheets in various places in the PowerPoint, and I need them to
show the relevent data from where they are linked. The only other
option that I have would be to separate the worksheets out into 30
individual Excel documents. This is not acceptable to the client.

Does anyone know how to make the hyperlink work reliably cross-
platform?

 

[Mark]

I think I finally found the cause of this 'problem'. Apparently, the
Mac version does not allow spaces in the Worksheet name when used in a
hyperlink, while the PC version does. When I removed the spaces from
the Worksheet name, the hyperlink works properly on the Mac.

 

[Steve Rindsberg]

I think I finally found the cause of this 'problem'. Apparently, the
Mac version does not allow spaces in the Worksheet name when used in a
hyperlink, while the PC version does. When I removed the spaces from
the Worksheet name, the hyperlink works properly on the Mac.

Nice work! Thanks for posting back about that.

 

[Mark]

Nice work!  Thanks for posting back about that.

I was surprised that I couldn't find any mention online of anyone else
encountering this problem. It was good to finally find a solution
(although it took me a day and a half), but unfortunately, that was
not the end of my hyperlink problems.

Today, the links I was inserting into the document stopped working
again, and I found that when I saved the PPT file, the string to
designate the worksheet was not retained when the file was reopened.
Another few hours led me to find that for some reason, my computer
will no longer save the worksheet info when saving as 2007. Saving
back to 2003 worked properly. As a test, I made a presentation with a
single shape, added the hyperlink, then saved it as both a .ppt
and .pptx file. Opening the .ppt file retained the proper link, but
the .pptx file only included the link to the excel document name - not
the link to the specific worksheet.

I don't understand why this stopped working, since I am certain the
files I was testing with the past couple of days were saved as .pptx
files.

 

[Steve Rindsberg]

I was surprised that I couldn't find any mention online of anyone else
encountering this problem. It was good to finally find a solution
(although it took me a day and a half), but unfortunately, that was
not the end of my hyperlink problems.

Today, the links I was inserting into the document stopped working
again, and I found that when I saved the PPT file, the string to
designate the worksheet was not retained when the file was reopened.

That's a known bug in PPT 2007, in case you're doing the save there.
I *think* it's fixed in SP2 but if not, there should be a hotfix available
to correct it. Have a look here:

PowerPoint 2007 Hotfixes and Service Packs
http://www.pptfaq.com/FAQ00933.htm