Linking to Slides in PowerPoint

The programs provided as part of the Office suite do a pretty good job of working together. Of course, trying to get them to work together well can be a challenge at times, but once you know the little tricks, life is much easier.

For instance, let's say you wanted to insert a hyperlink in a Word document and have that hyperlink reference a slide in a PowerPoint presentation. You can do this by following these steps:

1. Highlight the text to which you want to attach the hyperlink.
2. Press Ctrl+K. Word displays the Insert Hyperlink dialog box. (See Figure 1.)



Figure 1. The Insert Hyperlink dialog box.

3. Click on the Existing File or Web Page button at the left side of the dialog box.
4. In the Look In area, make sure Current Folder is chosen.
5. Navigate through the folders, just as you would if you were using the Windows Explorer. You want to locate and select the PowerPoint presentation file.
6. When the PowerPoint file is selected, the full path to the file appears at the bottom of the dialog box, in the Address box. At the end of the address, type a pound sign (#) followed by the slide number you want to use from the presentation. For instance, if you want to use the forty-second slide, your full entry might be C:\My Documents\Presentations\sample.ppt#42.
7. Click on OK.

If you don't know the slide number that PowerPoint is using for a particular slide, you can use this method to insert the hyperlink:

1. Open your PowerPoint presentation.
2. Select the slide that will be the target of your hyperlink in Word.
3. Press Ctrl+C to copy the slide.
4. Switch to Word.
5. Position the insertion point where you want your hyperlink located.
6. Using the controls available under the Paste tool (on the Home tab of the ribbon), choose to paste the slide as a hyperlink.
7. Edit the new hyperlink, as desired.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (10439) applies to Microsoft Word 2007 and 2010. You can find a version of this tip for the older menu interface of Word here: Linking to Slides in PowerPoint.