Create an Image Map Slide

Have an image or screenshot with lots of good, linkable real estate that you want to use in your content? I had exactly that challenge over the weekend while building a presentation to promote an upcoming event for a non-profit organization I work with.

So what did I do? I leveraged a series of invisible text boxes to overlay a bunch of links on a single object in PowerPoint. I published and sure enough, it worked exactly as I expected it would. All the links were recognized without a problem by Ariculate Presenter when I published to Flash.

Here’s how the little trick works:

1. Fire up PowerPoint and add a new slide to your deck.
2. Get your image or screenshot ready and in PowerPoint go to Insert -> Picture -> From File to bring your graphic on in.
3. Determine the areas you want to make linkable.
4. Go to Insert -> Text Box -> Horizontal and draw your text box around the first linkable area.
5. If necessary, click in your text box and add some carriage returns to expand the height.
6. Press Escape on your keyboard to bring the focus out of editing the text box and onto the object itself.
7. Press Control-K (or Insert -> Hyperlink) and select the option to Link to: Existing File or Web Page.
8. Type or paste your URL into the Address field and click OK.
9. Repeat steps 4 through 8 for all your other linkable areas.
10. Publish.

Here’s a simple example of this method in action:

View Image Map Example