Question: How Do I Make An Invisible Button in PowerPoint?
Invisible buttons, also known as hotspots, make it easy to navigate to specific slides within your PowerPoint presentation. These invisible buttons are great to use in classroom teaching situations to add a little something special to a lesson plan or to use as a new quiz format. In business, invisible buttons can direct the client's attention to specific sales figures or information on other slides.
Answer: Here are two different methods of creating invisible buttons (or invisible hyperlinks) in PowerPoint.
See the steps above as described in Method 1 to make the action button invisible.
Method 1 - Creating Invisible Buttons Using Action Buttons
>> Step by Step Screenshot Walkthrough
- Choose Slide Show > Action Buttons and choose the Action Button: Custom which is the first selection in the top row.
- Drag your mouse from the top left corner of the object to the bottom right corner. This will create a rectangular shape over the object.
- The Action Settings dialog box appears.
- Select the slide or document or web site you wish to link to.
- Click OK.
Steps to Change the Color of the Action Button
- Right-click on the colored rectangle and choose Format AutoShape...
- Choose No Fill for the fill color
- Choose No Line for the line color
- Click on OK
Test the link
- Choose Slide Show > View Show or press the F5
shortcut key.
- When you reach the slide with the invisible button, click on the button. The slide should change to the one you linked to.
- After testing the first invisible button, if necessary, continue adding more from this same slide to other slides.
- You will probably also want to place another invisible button on the "destination" slide to link to the next question or back to the previous slide. In that case it is easiest to make the button large enough to cover the whole slide. That way, you can click anywhere on the slide to make the invisible button work.
Method 2 - Use a Different Shape as Your Invisible Button
If you want to make your invisible button as a circle or other shape, you can do so by using the AutoShapes, from the Drawing toolbar at the bottom of the screen. This method requires an extra few steps, because you must first apply the Action Settings and then change the color of the AutoShape to invisible.
Use an AutoShape
- From the Drawing toolbar at the bottom of the screen, choose AutoShapes > Basic Shapes and choose a shape from the selections.
(Note - If the Drawing toolbar is not visible, choose View > Toolbars > Drawing from the main menu.)
- Drag your mouse over the object you wish to link.
Apply Action Settings
- Right-click on the AutoShape and choose Action Settings....
- Choose the appropriate settings in the Action Setting dialog box as discussed in Method 1.
See the steps above as described in Method 1 to make the action button invisible.
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