Hyperlink to slide doesn't work for one link

G

Guest

In the past week, two of my students encountered the same problem, and I can't figure out what is wrong. Both were using PowerPoint 2002. One was Windows XP, and the other was using Windows 2000 Professional. They were creating a simple presentation with six slides: a title slide, a menu slide, and four content slides. The menu slide was a bulleted list slide with four bullet points. Each bullet point was ordinary text and was turned into a hyperlink to each of the four content slides using Insert Hyperlink

Both students encountered the same problem. Three of the hyperlinks worked without any glitches, but one of the hyperlinks would not work. The text changed color and became underlined, the hand showed up when the mouse was over it, and it appeared to be set when choosing Insert Hyperlink again, but when clicking on it (in Slide Show view), it did nothing

The other strange thing about this was that when inserting the hyperlink, there is a preview of the slide to which you are linking. This was true for all the hyperlinks that worked, but the preview did not show up for the ones that didn't work

Finally, one of the students got around this by choosing to link to the next slide instead of a specific slide (by luck, the link that didn't work was supposed to go to the next slide anyway), and this worked fine

I'm sure we could find numerous ways to work around this (creating a new slide show and inserting the slides, for example), but there wasn't time (this was during an exam--neither one lost credit for Microsoft's bug)

Anyone have any idea what's going on here? Is this just a bug. I had never encountered this before and suddenly I see it twice within a week

--Davi

David M. Marcovit
Director of Graduate Programs in Educational Technolog
Loyola College in Maryland
 
K

Kathy J

Did the titles on the slides you couldn't link to have commas in them? I
would practically bet the house on this being the problem. If there is a
comma in the title of the slide, the links don't build right (if you can get
them to build at all.)

(FYI: Even though I know better than to use a comma in a slide title, I
still got hit with it in a presentation earlier this week. Changed the title
on a slide to something that had a comma in it and suddenly couldn't get to
it anymore. Took a bit before I realized what I had done.)

--
Kathryn Jacobs, Microsoft MVP PowerPoint
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David M. Marcovitz said:
In the past week, two of my students encountered the same problem, and I
can't figure out what is wrong. Both were using PowerPoint 2002. One was
Windows XP, and the other was using Windows 2000 Professional. They were
creating a simple presentation with six slides: a title slide, a menu slide,
and four content slides. The menu slide was a bulleted list slide with four
bullet points. Each bullet point was ordinary text and was turned into a
hyperlink to each of the four content slides using Insert Hyperlink.
Both students encountered the same problem. Three of the hyperlinks
worked without any glitches, but one of the hyperlinks would not work. The
text changed color and became underlined, the hand showed up when the mouse
was over it, and it appeared to be set when choosing Insert Hyperlink again,
but when clicking on it (in Slide Show view), it did nothing.
The other strange thing about this was that when inserting the hyperlink,
there is a preview of the slide to which you are linking. This was true for
all the hyperlinks that worked, but the preview did not show up for the ones
that didn't work.
Finally, one of the students got around this by choosing to link to the
next slide instead of a specific slide (by luck, the link that didn't work
was supposed to go to the next slide anyway), and this worked fine.
I'm sure we could find numerous ways to work around this (creating a new
slide show and inserting the slides, for example), but there wasn't time
(this was during an exam--neither one lost credit for Microsoft's bug).
Anyone have any idea what's going on here? Is this just a bug. I had
never encountered this before and suddenly I see it twice within a week.
 
G

Guest

That's it! I'm home now so I can't check both of the presentations out, but I have one saved on my flash drive, and it has a comma in the title of the slide that couldn't be hyperlinked to. So does this get reported to the Microsoft wish list or the bug list
--Davi

----- Kathy J wrote: ----

Did the titles on the slides you couldn't link to have commas in them?
would practically bet the house on this being the problem. If there is
comma in the title of the slide, the links don't build right (if you can ge
them to build at all.
 
E

Echo S

MS is aware of the issue. FWIW, it really only cropped up for the first time
about a year ago.

Shyam Pillai has provided an explanation for this behavior, which I dug up
on Google Groups: It appears that the information assigned when one uses
ActionSetting and when one uses Insert/Hyperlink are different when the
slide has a title.

e.g If the 2nd slide has a title. "This is a comma(,)" then if you use
Insert/Hyperlink the following information is stored.

2. This is a comma(,)

But if you use action setting | Slide... and select the 2nd slide it gets
the following information.

257,2,This is a comma(,)

If you read the SubAddress information in the PPTFAQ, you can understand why
the 1st hyperlink address is failing to open the correct linked slide--the
comma is confusing it. http://www.rdpslides.com/pptfaq/FAQ00162.htm

--
Echo [MS PPT MVP]
http://www.echosvoice.com

David M. Marcovitz said:
That's it! I'm home now so I can't check both of the presentations out,
but I have one saved on my flash drive, and it has a comma in the title of
the slide that couldn't be hyperlinked to. So does this get reported to the
Microsoft wish list or the bug list?
 

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