Create an Image Map Slide

Aug142006
Written by — Posted in Articulate Presenter

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:

SNAG-1628.png

View Image Map Example

5 responses to “Create an Image Map Slide”

1

Very good tip, I will definately be using that in the near future !!!

Matt // Posted at 4:40 pm on August 14th, 2006
2

Thanks Gabe!

Brian // Posted at 7:38 am on August 15th, 2006
3

Gabe:

in fact, this seems to be the only way to get links properly parsed under Mac OS X.

Jack

Jack Yensen // Posted at 10:37 am on August 16th, 2006
4

A more robust method that works on any type of slide content is to use Autoshape, Action Buttons, Hyperlink to (URL or web page) and make the formatting of the Action Button, No fill.

This will work well, too, with conditional branching to other parts of the presentation.

Jack

Jack Yensen // Posted at 11:26 am on August 16th, 2006
5

Gabe:

we have tried publishing to CD and from CD files, the URL (external)links are not parsed properly on Mac. Is this a Flash Global Security issue, do you know?

Jack

Jack Yensen // Posted at 12:12 pm on August 16th, 2006

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