Hyperlink to slide in same presentation (PPT XP)

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I have received a PowerPoint XP presentation with the following problem (I cannot recreate the problem in any presentation I create): When creating a hyperlink to a slide within this same presentation the following prompt is received during the slide show when clicking the link “cannot open the specified file”. This is how the hyperlinks are being created: Select and right-click text or object, choose Hyperlink, choose Place in this Document, Slide Titles, then select the proper slide title. The options for first slide, last slide, previous, and next work ok. Any ideas???

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Oooh, that’s a weird one. Do you have Norton Antivirus installed, by any chance? And Office XP SP-2? That combination tends to disrupt OLE embedded objects such as Excel charts, so who knows, it may be affecting this, too. There’s more info at http://www.rdpslides.com/pptfaq/FAQ00236.htm%5B/url%5D. I’m not sure anything there will help, but it would be worth a look.

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Yesterday afternoon as I was working on this problem, again, I discovered that sometimes I could create a link that worked and other times not. As I was working in the Insert Hyperlink box I noticed that when I chose some slides the slide would appear in the Slide Preview box, but others wouldn’t. The slides that wouldn’t appear were the slides I could not create a hyperlink to. For one of the slides that would not appear, I copied the slide and then tried again. That didn’t work. I then created a new slide, copied the objects on the slide that didn’t work and pasted them on the new slide (deleting the old slide). I could then create a hyperlink to that slide. Quite an odd workaround, but it was successful at the 11th hour 59th minute. Thanks for your reply. I will check out the site.

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Nice workaround, and very good detective work!

Since deleting and recreating the slide enabled the hyperlinks to work, then the information I posted isn’t even in the ballpark of being right! Based on the additional information, it sure sounds as if there was something on those problem slides that PPT didn’t like. We see that occasionally when printing or saving as HTML or sending to Word–there’s sometimes a slide that just hangs the process or balks, and the best resolution is to recreate it just as you did.

Can you think of anything those particular slides might have had in common?

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The first thing I did this morning was check for commonalities between those slides. I thought it might be some type of animation. That wasn’t the case. Some had graphics, others didn’t. I couldn’t narrow it down to any one problem. Oh well, I’ve learned sometimes there just aren’t reasons or answers — just workarounds.

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I wonder if those slides were “imported” from another program. Guess you won’t know unless you have a chat with the originator of the file.

Cheers

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Any chance those slides had a comma in the title placeholder? A user just discovered a bug that causes the same behavior you were seeing. If there’s a comma in the title placeholder, hyperlinks to that slide don’t work. And when inserting the hyperlink, the slide won’t preview, either.

If that was indeed the issue, a workaround would be to copy the title placeholder and drag the original off the edge of the slide so it doesn’t show in show view. Delete the comma from that original and then set the link.

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Now that is arcane knowledge!

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Got all excited on this reply – those slides did indeed have a comma in the placeholder. I followed your instructions but it still didn’t allow a link to be created. Still got the prompt “cannot open specified file” but I COULD view the slide in the create hyperlink box. I think you’ve hit the nail on the head though – just don’t use commas in title placeholders. My workaround was to copy all objects to a new, blank slide and then it worked. Thanks for the reply!

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Hi Gwen,
I have found in other programmes as well as PowerPoint, that using odd characters such as #@~/ , as well as punctuation marks in text strings, stops Hyperlinks working properly. They come to a dead stop when they hit the odd character. And Catherine , loved you word “Arcane”, had to look it up on Gurunet !!!

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Heh. You can get a bit more excited, Gwen. MS PPT MVP Shyam Pillai has a better workaround: Use Action Settings instead of Insert/Hyperlink to link to the slide with the comma in its title.

Shyam also provided a better explanation for this behavior: 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. Hyperlink .SubAddress – How to interpret it

For what it’s worth, I’ve seen this bug twice in the past couple of days, but I’d never seen it mentioned before. Neither had Shyam. Go figure.

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I actually tried the Action Settings before initially posting this question. It didn’t work for me either. I could create a Next or Previous that went to a slide in question, but could not use a Custom button that navigated to this slide. I wasn’t the creator of this presentation, so I don’t know what “techniques” were used to create it, but I DO know that I will never, ever personally use commas, or any other special characters in titles! Thanks everyone!

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