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 link it to a Word or Excel document (and specify exactly which part of the document you want to open)? Yes, it can be done and I will show you how in this post.
To get started, you’ll need your PowerPoint presentation as well as the other file you want to link to. In this example, we’ll link two PowerPoint presentations together and immediately jump to Slide 2 in the second presentation.
Link multiple PowerPoint presentations
Step 1: Find or create the audience you want for your link. This can be an image, clipart, text, etc. Select the object and click Hyperlink bottom button Insert navigation. This should work fine on Office 2007, 2010 and 2013.
Step 2: Now that the Hyperlink dialog box has opened, browse and find your file that you want to link to. Click once to bookmark the file, but don’t close the dialog box yet because there’s one more step to complete.
Note: If you complete this step, you’ll just link to the entire presentation or document, rather than to a specific location in the document.
Step 3: Click Bookmarks button located on the right side of the dialog box. This button will open another window where you can choose where you want to go in the linked document.
If you are linking to a PowerPoint presentation, it will display all the different slides. Select the position in the presentation you want and press OK.
Step 4: Click the appropriate buttons to close and save the changes you just made.
Step 5: Test the link to make sure it works properly. Note: Hyperlinks in PowerPoint only work when you’re in slide show mode.
This feature can be very useful if you want to use another part of the presentation as you please, but don’t want to make the presentation process too long. It is also useful if you want to tailor your presentation to different audiences.
For some audiences, you can go through your presentation without clicking the hyperlink, but others may need more details, so you click the hyperlink and display it. Show them additional information.
Also note that when you link to another slide in another presentation, it will display all the slides after the linked slide in the second presentation before returning to the next slide. in the original presentation.
Link PowerPoint to Word or Excel
Unfortunately, the process of linking to a Word bookmark or an Excel named range is not so straightforward. If you follow the steps above and select the Word file, and then click Bookmarks, you will receive the following error message:
Microsoft PowerPoint cannot open this file or cannot parse a file of this type.
So what do you have to do now? Yes, you must manually enter the bookmark name or named range after the path in the address box.
First select the file and then add # the symbol and name of the bookmark to the end. Click OK and then test the link to make sure it works. In case you are not sure how to create bookmarks in Word, all you have to do is select any place on your Word document and then go to Insert tab and click Bookmarks.
Go ahead and give your bookmark a name and that’s it. When you click a link from your PowerPoint presentation, it opens Word at the exact location of the bookmark in the document.
In Excel, select the cells, then go ahead and type a name in the little box that shows you the cell number and press Enter.
When you click the link, it opens Excel and the whole range is automatically selected, so you don’t have to go around looking for it.
In general, the hyperlink feature is quite useful if you have a presentation supplemented with links to supporting data or documents. If you have any questions, feel free to post a comment. Interesting!
