Building Flexibility and Interactivity into Your Presentations

Creating well-planned visuals is a great thing but being able to build flexible content that helps you interact with your audience is even better, for you and your audience! Yes—it does take some more planning, but the rewards can be huge. It can help you feel more confident, knowing that you always have the right visual to pull up to answer questions, and it helps keep your audience engaged because they realize they can ask you to go back to a topic.

Building bigger presentations that contain flexible elements might even allow you to reuse more content instead of recreating new presentations all the time. You will be the judge after reading through the topics of this chapter, where we will discuss the following:

• Using navigation elements in a presentation
• Creating custom shows
• Using the Zoom feature to navigate your content
• Creating triggered menus

Technical requirements

Most topics discussed in this chapter don’t require having a Microsoft 365 (M365) subscription, the tools and features having been introduced in previous versions of PowerPoint. Only the Zoom feature requires Office 2019, Office 2021, or M365.

Be aware that since the subscription version of PowerPoint is being updated on an ongoing basis, it is possible that some features don’t appear exactly the same in your version of the application.

Using navigation elements in a presentation

Navigating in a presentation means that we click on an object, or move the mouse cursor over it, to access other content. It requires being comfortable with having to click on those slide objects during your presentation, whether using your mouse or a remote allowing mouse cursor control. You also need to plan your navigation ahead of time to make sure that if you access other content, you have the possibility to come back to the slide you were showing.

This section will help you create your navigation even if you don’t have a recent version of PowerPoint (Office 2019, Office 2021, or Office for M365). Later in this chapter, we will discuss the Zoom feature, which allows creating navigation in an easier way, but it’s only available and compatible with recent versions of PowerPoint. Let’s start with our first section on the use of action buttons.

Navigating with action buttons

If you don’t know where to...

Creating custom shows

Custom shows are a way to create and present a subset of a larger presentation file. In the past, I have used them to create a complex marketing dashboard for salespeople or even a training dashboard allowing me to choose content according to a specific topic or duration.

Let’s continue with the same example used previously, except that now the presentation file has more slides for each presenter. We will want to create one custom show per presenter, and then change the hyperlink on our menu slide. Sections were created to make it easier to see the number of slides per speaker in the screenshot (Figure 9.8):

Figure 9.8 – Presentation in Slide Sorter view with four sections of speaker slides

To create custom shows, you need to go to the Slide Show tab (1) and click on the Custom Slide Show button (2) to access the Custom Shows… feature (3) (Figure 9.9):

Figure 9.9 – Accessing...

Using the Zoom feature to navigate your content

Microsoft describes its Zoom feature as a way to make your presentations more dynamic and exciting. I call it hyperlinking on steroids because you might not have to use the features described in the previous sections ever again.

Tip

The word zoom has been used a lot in the PowerPoint interface. The Zoom feature refers to hyperlinks created to other slides or sections, not to be confused with the Zoom animation (applied to slide objects), the Zoom transition (applied on a slide), and the tool used to magnify your slide view, also called Zoom.

Since the Zoom feature was introduced, I must say I have saved a lot of design time while still creating interactive content. There are three types of zooms in PowerPoint:

• Summary Zoom allows you to quickly create your navigation page in just a few clicks. It adds a new slide with the Zoom objects on it, linking to the selected sections.
• Section Zoom allows you to create a navigation...

Creating triggered menus

Now that you have seen many features that can help you create more interactive presentations, let’s create an advanced interactive menu with the help of slide zooms and a trigger animation. The result of this technique will be that when clicking on an invisible shape on my slide (1), a menu with two slide zooms (2) will move in from the left of the slide (3) to allow accessing either of the slides (Figure 9.18):

Figure 9.18 – Using a hidden Slide Zoom menu

As you can see in the Selection pane (4), the invisible shape has been renamed Menu trigger (5) and the slide zooms are part of Group 5 (6).

Since we have discussed all the components included in the creation of this example in previous sections and chapters, I want to challenge you a little more to recreate it. What follows are all the steps to create a hidden menu that can be made visible with a trigger. Try it, then have a look in the Further reading section...

Summary

In this chapter, we have seen how to create and use various navigation elements in our presentations and create custom shows so that we can easily access a subset of our slides without creating a new file. We have also discussed the use of the various Zoom features to quickly create more interactive content, and how to create a hidden Zoom menu with the use of triggers.

Becoming a more flexible and interactive presenter is something you should consider. Having the possibility to move away from a strictly linear delivery style is much more engaging for audiences. I have been including flexibility and interactivity in my presentations for many years now, even when I had to plan and create everything with hyperlinks, triggers, and custom shows. Even though it was very time-consuming, I was always rewarded by audiences asking me whether I could go back to a previous section or slide because they realized I was not stuck in a linear slideshow.

Now that PowerPoint offers us...

Further reading

• Microsoft Support article on action settings: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/add-commands-to-your-presentation-with-action-buttons-7db2c0f8-5424-4780-93cb-8ac2b6b5f6ce
• Link to a video tutorial on triggered menus: https://youtu.be/f48e-dmYkSY