PowerPoint Tips Blog

Helping you with presenting, PowerPoint, and speaking

  • Home
  • Blog
  • Tips
  • E-Store
  • Training
  • About
  • Affiliates
  • Advertise
  • Contact
You are here: Home / Design / Design principles / Create a tile menu with hyperlinks to slides

Create a tile menu with hyperlinks to slides

January 26, 2015 by Ellen Finkelstein 8 Comments

READ LATER - DOWNLOAD THIS POST AS PDF >> CLICK HERE <<

It’s often useful to create a menu for your first or second slide. Here are some scenarios:

  • To facilitate easy navigation to anywhere in your presentationpowerpoint-tips-tile-interface-menu-2
  • To allow your audience to choose the order of the content, for a non-linear, live presentation
  • To allow viewers to navigate through an online presentation

Use an updated interface style

A recent design trend uses tiles to create a visual menu. You’ve probably seen this type of tile menu in Windows 8/8.1, but others have used it as well. This type of menu is easy to create in PowerPoint.

Here’s an example.

powerpoint-tips-tile-interface-menu-1

Create the shapes

Hallmarks of this style is colorful squares and rectangles laid out in a grid. PowerPoint’s alignment tools make it easy.

Start by inserting a square. If you click the Rectangle shape on the Home tab and simply click on the slide, you’ll automatically get a square. You can then resize it by dragging on any corner but to maintain the perfect square shape, press and hold the Shift key as you drag. Or, you can click the Rectangle shape, press and hold the Shift key and drag the square on the slide to the size you want.

Before going any further, with the first square selected, click the Format tab and choose Shape Outline, No Outline.

Tip: To quickly fill the slide with squares, place the first square about where you want it and press Ctrl+D. Move the duplicate to the right of the square, making sure it is perfectly aligned with it–not higher or lower. Look at PowerPoint’s alignment guides and you’ll feel the second square click into place. Then press Ctrl + D again until you have the squares you want. Finally, select all of the squares and duplicate them in a second row.  You want the vertical and horizontal distances to be the same.

Some of the shapes will need more space, so you can turn them into rectangles that take up the space of 2 squares. Simply delete one of the squares and drag the side handle of the remaining square until it lines up with the right side of the square above or below it. Again, you should see alignment guides to help you. You might want to make these changes later, after you fill in the content and see how much space it needs.

Format the shapes

Fill the shapes with the colors in your theme colors. Remember that this style uses lots of bright colors. Then enter text into some of the shapes and insert images into others.

To fill a shape with an image, select it and on the Format tab, choose Shape Fill, Picture. In the dialog box, you can insert pictures from your computer or online sources.

Note: If you use the Bing search, you’ll need to check the Creative Commons license to make sure that you can comply with it. For example, you might need commercial use and modifications allowed. But in order to legally use the image, you need to provide attribution in the form of a label on the slide. You’ll need to do that separately. If you can purchase images, I recommend 123rf.com for over 35,000,000 legal, low-cost, high-quality images. (This is an affiliate link, but you should know that I use 123rf when I need to buy images.)

Hyperlink the tiles

Finally, hyperlink the tiles to complete the tile menu. Select a tile, and go to Insert tab, Hyperlink. Choose Place in This Document and select the slide you want to link to. Click OK.

You can also hyperlink to other files and websites.

I cover details of creating a menu in two older posts that I think you’ll find helpful:

Create a visual menu

Designing a web-style, menu-based presentation

3 orange large asterisks

Have you used a similar technique? What was your experience? Leave a comment?

Share7
Tweet
Share10
+12
Shares 19
READ LATER - DOWNLOAD THIS POST AS PDF >> CLICK HERE <<

Related posts:

  1. Using hyperlinks
  2. Use timing, animation, or sound in a presentation with hyperlinks
  3. Create your own graphics with bursts and stars
  4. Create invisible buttons

Filed Under: Design principles, Hyperlinks, Shapes & text boxes, Slide layout Tagged With: menu, tile, visual menu

8
Leave a Reply

avatar
This comment form is under antispam protection
6 Comment threads
2 Thread replies
0 Followers
 
Most reacted comment
Hottest comment thread
5 Comment authors
JTVishwaroopJanet van den HeeverEllen FinkelsteinJohn Hathorn Recent comment authors
avatar
This comment form is under antispam protection
  Subscribe  
newest oldest most voted
Notify of
John Hathorn
Guest
John Hathorn

Once you’ve jumped to a series of slides from the Menu Slide, you might want to have the user return to the Menu Slide so he can access another slide series. On the last slide of any series you’ve jumped to, put a window (button) that says RETURN and assign a hyperlink that references the Menu Slide. This in effect creates a Subroutine in a normal computer language like FORTRAN or C.

Vote Up0Vote Down 
7 years ago
Ellen Finkelstein
Guest
Ellen Finkelstein

John, of course you’re right. I do mention the need to have a link to return to the menu in the older posts that I linked to. Thanks for bringing that out.

Vote Up0Vote Down 
7 years ago
Janet van den Heever
Guest
Janet van den Heever

Hello

As I do not use Powerpoint a lot presently, I still like to be up to date. This is a great opportunity to update skills and learn more.

Regards

Vote Up0Vote Down 
7 years ago
Vishwaroop
Guest
Vishwaroop

Hi,

With newer version of powerpoints, I believe action buttons provide an easier approach for the same. As John pointed out, we can have simple return action button which is default linked to last slide viewed makes it really easy. Here is something that I wrote regarding the same:
http://playaroundwithppt.blogspot.in/2015/02/episode-4-using-action-buttons-in.html
Nice read by the way!!!Thumbs up!!!

Regards

Vote Up0Vote Down 
7 years ago
Ellen Finkelstein
Guest
Ellen Finkelstein

Vishwaroop,
That’s a great technique. You can also make the slide that you’re going to a Custom Show and set it to return to the original slide. I write about them at http://www.ellenfinkelstein.com/pptblog/add-flexibility-with-custom-shows/

Vote Up0Vote Down 
7 years ago
JT
Guest
JT

Hi,
Having figured out how to manually create a t-0-c in PPt, I ran across something of yours from years back mentioning a “summary slide” button–which I couldn’t find, naturally, on PPT 2013. Then I saw someone replying to an earlier post of yours advertising a free Add In. Can you direct me to that person or site?
Tx,
JT Barbarese

Vote Up0Vote Down 
7 years ago
Ellen Finkelstein
Guest
Ellen Finkelstein

I did a search and found this: http://blog.momsoftco.com/2008/06/how-to-create-a-summary-slide-on-powerpoint/
It mentions something called PowerTOC. You can search for that and find several sites that offer it for $29.95.

Vote Up0Vote Down 
7 years ago
JT
Guest
JT

Thanks for the tip. I steered my way there, purchased the add-on, loaded it, and waited for it to load. It never did. Went back to their site, posted a question, but I have still rec’d no answer from the vendor. I found nothing, btw, on the faqs indicating that it was not compatible with Office 13, which is what I’m running. So, caveat emptor.

Vote Up0Vote Down 
7 years ago
wpdiscuz   wpDiscuz

Free Video Training!

13 Techniques that Will Make Designing Your Slides EASY!

And get the PowerPoint Tips Newsletter with tips and resources for presenters. Plus 5 bonus tips!

BirdSend Email Marketing Tool
4-up-ads PresenterMedia PoweredTemplate High-Persuasion Secrets Power Pointers Quarter Hour


Recent Posts

Recent Posts

  • Using PowerPoint’s cartoon people
  • Which version of PowerPoint should you buy?
  • Add a customizable, live web feed with Cameo
  • Get a designer look with abstract images to create backgrounds for slides and shapes
  • Creating and using a strong call-to-action slide

Connect with me!

Connect with me! Twitter LinkedIn Facebook

Ellen Finkelstein, Inc. · Fairfield, IA · Tel: 515-989-1832

Privacy, Refund, and Other Legal Stuff

wpDiscuz