Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Creating and Using Action Buttons in PowerPoint”.
In this PowerPoint video, I’m going to show you how to create and use action buttons in your PowerPoint slideshows, let’s get started so here I am in my slideshow and I want to go to the first slide and I would like to create some action buttons here That will direct the viewer to a specific place within this slideshow. One way to do this is by using action buttons. So I’m going to go up here and click on insert and I’m going to look for the illust illustrations group and I’m looking for shapes. Here’S shapes, if you browse down to the very bottom of the list of shapes.
We have action buttons and I’m just going to select one how about this one here it looks like a play button I’ll, then click and drag on my slide to add this action button as I’m dragging it onto my slide. If I hold the shift key, it will make sure that it stays as a perfect square. So that looks pretty good. Once you release the mouse button, you get a dialogue box that pops up with some action settings. The first consideration that you might have when you’re working on the action settings is.
How do I want this action button to work? Do I want it to work on a mouse click? In other words, somebody clicks on the button or a mouse over. If the mouse just goes over the top of this button, then something will happen. I think I’ll stick with mouse click at this point by default. It’S set to when clicked to hyperlink to the next slide and that may be perfectly appropriate for for what I want, but in this case I want this action button to take the viewer to the slide that has the butterfly on it.
So, instead of next slide, I’m going to choose slide and then select the exact slide slide. Three click. Okay, if I want to, I can have PowerPoint also play a sound when the button is clicked. Maybe this whoosh sound I’ll click.
Okay, now before I try this button out, I’m asking myself: how will the viewer the person that’s going through this slide show? How will they know what the button’s going to do? Well, there’s something I can do to make it clear if I doubleclick on the button, while I’m in design mode PowerPoint lets me type on the button, so I’ll just type learn about butterflies. Now, if I want to, I can double click or triple click on the text to highlight it, and I could bold the text I could make it bigger or smaller. I could change its color or highlight it whatever. I want to do to make that text stand out a little better, I’m pretty happy with that.
So, let’s test it out, I’m going to start the PowerPoint slideshow there’s a couple of ways. I could do that, but one is just to click this little tiny button at the bottom of the screen. That starts my slideshow. Now, when I click on this button, it Should Skip the caterpillar slide and go to the butterfly slide.
I click I get my sound effect and there’s the butterfly slide now, I’m going to tap escape on the keyboard to get out of presentation mode and back into design mode. Now, of course, at this point, if I wanted to, I could insert another action button. Maybe this one here and I could have it go back to my first slide: click: okay, click. Okay, there’s my button.
I can drag it to where I want it to be, make it the size. I want it to be holding shift to keep it as a square. If I want to, I could double click and type in back to beginning. So now, when I start my slideshow yes, I can click learn about butterflies.
It takes me to the butterfly slide, but if I want to go back, I can just click back to the beginning, and it takes me right back here so so I hope you can see how easy it would be to set up a bunch of buttons on The first slide, or the second slide, and give the viewer some choice about what they’re going to look at next. It makes the PowerPoint presentation a little bit more interactive and gives the student or the viewer some choice and control of their own learning and experience. I’M going to tap escape to get out of the presentation, because I want you to see that if I change my mind about what I want this button to do, I can just rightclick on it and choose edit link and I get back to the action settings And I could switch it to be a mouse over or I could adjust some of these other options, but I also want you to see that, instead of hyperlinking to a specific slide, you could hyperlink to a web page. You could just put in a URL when the viewer clicks on the button it takes them to the web page or website that you’ve linked to you could also hyperlink to another PowerPoint presentation or another file.
So so it could open a word doc, a PDF, a Google Earth file, a video whatever it is. You want to link to that’s a file. We also have the option to run a program so when they click this button it could open up Adobe Photoshop or it could open up Microsoft, Word or publisher or Excel whatever program you want to. Have it open? That’S on your computer.
You would just navigate your computer, find the program, select it and choose open now. I hope you’ll also think about the mouse over option. The options look the same but think about this think about having a diagram on a PowerPoint slide. Maybe you have an illustration of the different parts of a cell or you’ve got the water cycle here or whatever it might be, as the viewer puts their Mouse over different parts of the diagram or the parts of the cell or the water cycle, you could have Specific Sounds playing and notice that you’re not limited just to the built-in sounds in Microsoft.
Powerpoint you can go to other sounds and select sounds that are on your computer. If they’re wave files they’ll be compatible, so you could pretty easily make it so that when the viewer or the student puts their Mouse over a certain part of the water cycle, your voice comes on saying. This is precipitation. We know it as rain or snow and it serves this purpose, Etc.
So, in my opinion, there are some really exciting ways that we could use action buttons within our PowerPoint present presentations thanks for watching. I hope you found this tutorial to be helpful. If you did please like follow And subscribe, and when you do click the bell and you’ll be notified. When I post another video, if you’d like to support my channel, you can do that by clicking the thanks button below the video and by supporting me on my patreon account and by buying Channel merch and you’ll, see information about those options.
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