Summary: Add code to a hyperlink in Engage to link the interaction to a slide in PowerPoint.
Difficulty: Medium
It is not every day that you come across a new “hack” that you know is somehow bound to make it into the annals of Articulate development. Well, we are going to look at one which lets you link from any step in an Engage interaction embedded in your PowerPoint presentation to any other slide in the same PowerPoint presentation.
First, have a look at an example I put together showing how a labeled graphic can link to different slides in a presentation and be then linked back to the Engage interaction.
I didn’t do the whole map – just the orange markers link to other slides, plus the Exit link.
As you can see, the Engage interaction is used as a menu to other pages. You can therefore use any Engage interaction as a menu or sub-menu to your presentation. You can also link directly from one Engage interaction to another and back again.
How Do You Do It?
First some history.
A post on our forums caught the eye of one our developers. It was a plea to be able to link from Engage to a particular slide in PowerPoint.
Well, as easy as that might sound, this had not been possible without going into some considerable effort to create specially prepared SWF files containing Actionscript code. The code told the Articulate player to go to one slide or another. Here is an example I did some eighteen months ago. There was an easier solution, but the drawback was that the player had to restart before the slide was loaded as you can see in this example. This looked messy.
With this “hack”, we can now link to whatever slide we like from Engage without the player restarting and without having to write Flash. Here’s what you need to do:
Step By Step
- 1. Create your Engage interaction and add a hyperlink on a word. You’ll need to select some text and press the Hyperlink button:
- 2. Add this code as an http hyperlink with the last number indicating which slide in PowerPoint you want to link to:
asfunction:_level44.playSlide,5 - 3. Publish your interaction to PowerPoint.
- 4. Allow the user to leave the interaction at any time:
- 5. Now publish your PowerPoint presentation with Articulate Presenter and the hyperlinks in Engage will link to slides in your presentation (in this example to slide 5).
This hyperlink is linking to slide 5. If you want the link to go to slide 4, then replace the 5 at the end with a 4. Note too that the http:// we have at the beginning of a regular link is not used here. Then click OK.
IMPORTANT NOTES
Hi,
Can you embed a short Presenter presentation (i.e., a quiz and an interaction) in an Engage Interaction?
Also, I’ve followed your instructions for embedding Engage within Engage, and i get nothing when I click on the link. I changed security settings for my Flash player, but I am working with a firewall. Any thoughts about why those hyperlinks aren’t working?
Thanks!
Alyse
[...] to the user. If you want to use Engage to navigate to another slide in AP, Dave Perso wrote a nice tutorial regarding this on his blog. HTH, [...]
Hi Alyse, Sorry to take my time getting back to you. Hope you’ve progressed a little. You can certainly place a quiz in Engage as this article shows, but it is more difficult to place an Articulate Presenter presentation within Engage. A workaround is to place a Presenter slide within Engage. ie. publish a regular PowerPoint slide in Presenter, locate the published files and the SWF file corresponding to the slide and import that into Engage.
Regarding Engage within Engage, which link are you referring to? One on my site or a link in your project? I am not sure which hyperlinks you mean.
Hi-
This is great! I’m curious, is it possible to link text from the powerpoint presentation to the Engage Glossary tab? My client wants to be able to click on glossary terms as they come up in the powerpoint presentation and have that link point to the glossary.
Thanks very much!
Liz
Hi Liz, That would be nice, wouldn’t it?
It is an often requested feature. Unfortunately, it is not possible for the moment. As yet, there is no workaround to get hyperlinks to link directly to a glossary other than this solution which is a little complex.
[...] You could do that, but as Justin says, you would probably be violating Google’s terms of use. This example shows examples of embedded YouTube videos in resized web objects on a slide. (Click on the demo at [...]
This doesn’t work anymore with the last version of Articulate Studio’09…. I have been trying many times without any success….. I am testing Articulate as a new authoring tool for our company, found it very buggy (going back & forth between Presenter-Engage leads to my errors … links to engage interactions are lost, duplicated interaction slides are inserted…
I find Engage very very limited in terms of customization…
Sorry.. I have to clarify 2 points regarding these issues :
- the trick can run with Studio 09, but the linked Presenter slide doesn’t display in the correct position of the player… it seems to go to 0;0… How to position it correctly ? did you experiment such problem ?
- I was using Studio from a Windows Virtual machine, and my folders where on external disks.. not on the C: one , I copied all my files on C: and it’s up and Presenter-Engage are running smoothly together….