Why won't use of trigger animations publish?

[Guest]

I'm working with PPT 2007 and Presenter 6.2

I've created a series of buttons that I've turned into trigger animations. I learned about it here if this explanation helps - http://www.ellenfinkelstein.com/powerpoint_tip_create_popup_windows.html For some reason, after I publish and view the resulting file in IE the buttons seem to load just fine but their actions don't work. They are supposed to make a small pop-up callout appear but they don't. Everything works find when I play the animations in the .ppt so I'm not sure why things aren't translating when I publish.

I can't share the file, unfortunately, as it's an internal company document. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Guest]

Scott,

As with Action Buttons that are native to PowerPoint, custom triggers (like the ones you tried to set up) will not work once you publish your PowerPoint deck.

I *think* the main reason why such functionality completely tanks has to do with the fact triggers and Action Buttons rely on Active X controls (or even Visual Basic)  to make them work; and that kind of "coding" is absolutely ignored the moment you click "publish" using Presenter's menu.

I realize that things will behave correctly when you test your work from the PowerPoint environment (like putting your deck into Slide Show mode for example), but unfortunately, just like some custom animation types won't convert, neither will anything that requires PowerPoint's control methods that add functionality to PowerPoint objects.

Bottom line: you can overcome this limitation in one of 2 possible ways:

1. recreate the effect you're looking for using Flash and import a swf into PowerPoint

2. recreate the effect using hyperlinked objects that point to hidden slides.  It's a bit more work, but in the end it DOES work.

Rob

www.robrode.com/yabb/