Starting a Presenter show from a specific slide

[Gregory_Pius]

I've created a menu system with PowerPoint and published with Presenter. It's used to launch other Presenter files.

The intent is that when the launched files are done playing, they call the menu back up to the same page they were launched from.

Is there any way to start a Presenter show from a slide other than the first one though the URL? I'd love for it to be something simple like " http://www.myshow.com&slide=1". But I already tried that and it doesn't work.

Cheers!

Gregory

[Guest]

Have you tried using the "go to slide" function found in the Slide Properties menu in Presenter? What about branching with PPT or to another URL?

Having a hard time seeing what you mean here.

[Gregory_Pius]

I'm creating a presentation in PowerPoint that demonstrates "What's New in Version 9.0" of a very sophisticated software product my company produces. The product has nine core modules, and my job is to produce a short, narrated vignette for each new or enhanced feature in each module. Each vignette is about six to ten slides, with a Flash movie at the end (created in Captivate) demonstrating the new or enhanced feature. In the end, I'll be producing about fifty of these vignettes, with about six to ten slides each.

My first thought was to put the main menu, its sub-menus, and all the vignettes in the same PowerPoint file. I don't want to do this for two reasons:

- The file will quickly become huge and unmanageable, and will take forever to publish.
- Experience with previous versions of Presenter has taught me NOT to put all my eggs in one basket--should the file become corrupt, which happened with alarming regularity with previous versions of Presenter, perhaps an entire day's work could be lost after restoring from a backup.

So I wanted to make the main- and sub-menus a single PowerPoint file, and each vignette a separate PowerPoint file. I did that, using PowerPoint hyperlinks to call up the vignette, which started up in a separate browser window. I thought everything was groovy. When the vignette stopped playing, a message appeared directing the viewer to close the newly-opened window to "return" to the main menu. ( see my POC page)

Elegant, right?

Upon demonstrating this system to my manager, she said she didn't want the vignettes opening up in a separate window. She wanted them to open up in the same browser window.

Unfortunately, this is much easier said than done.

Presenter translates PowerPoint hyperlinks that point to URLs into opening in a new browser window, with no option to specify otherwise. A workaround is to use a Flash movie button--a SWF about the size of a button that calls up a URL in the same browser window. But this isn't really a solution because if I do that, there's no way, once the vignette is done playing, to return to the same page in the menu--that I know of.

So there's where I'm at. I need to find some way to open a Presenter presentation in a browser to a specific slide, if that's even possible, from an external link.

A good compromise would be to have the hyperlink launch the vognette in a separate browser window and automatically maximize that browser window. I may be able to do that with a one-frame Flash movie embedded in the first slide of the vignette. But that's a workaround of last resort.

Whew.

[Guest]

If you have Flash, this is a project tailor-made for it, since you could easily build a Flash movie which loaded in other movies. You can store the whole set on the Breeze server, and your clients would never know the difference. It only takes a few lines of code and the results would be far superior to taking the long way around with PowerPoint.

[Gregory_Pius]

Erm... I would love to do that... if it weren't for the fact that I didn't know Flash and ActionScript all that well. 😞 I'm just a n00b when it comes to ActionScript--but I do have Flash MX, which should be more than good enough.

Guess it's time to break out the ActionScript books...

[Guest]

I recommend the Hands-On Training (HOT) book from Lynda.com for learning the basics, and then the various O'Reilly ActionScript books for programming. Since you're using MX, start with *ActionScript for Flash MX*, by Colin Moock, and get a copy of the *ActionScript for Flash MX - Pocket Reference* to go with it (saves a bunch of time). If you've studied JavaScript, you'll find converting over is rather like learning to speak "Southern" English in the U.S. (Y'all). You won't need to know much programming for your interface project , though, so you can skip learning the whole mess until you have a free weekend or two.

🙂