Hyperlinks not working after installing Presenter '13

Nov 12, 2013

In Presenter '09, I was able to hyperlink to a Web page without any difficulty.  I created a text box with the complete URL (see attached) and when the user hovers over that URL in the published presentation, the cursor changes to a hand and the link becomes active.  A left mouse click on that link takes you to that URL in a new window.  I republished this in Presenter '13, only to discover that hovering over the same link doesn't produce the same result.  I did a search of the forums and could not find an answer.  Any help would be appreciated to point me to guidance on how to make this an active (clickable) link in Presenter '13.  And yes, I'm aware this doesn't work in the preview, only when published.

A secondary question, will this kind of hyperlink to a Web page work with a published HTML5 presentation?  

38 Replies
Scott Dennstaedt

Don't need to link to a file, just to a Web page.  I had already reviewed the help page you included, but it really doesn't tell you much about linking to Web pages...just that Presenter supports linking to Web pages.  Evidently when upgrading to Presenter '13, it doesn't preserve the links that were currently in the presentation.  I created a hyperlink from a text box, but the published presentation does not include a clickable link.  This used to work just fine in Presenter '09.  Any other suggestions? 

Scott Dennstaedt

I think the case is essentially closed.  Presenter '13 doesn't support hyperlinks that occur in groups whereas Presenter '09 did.  So, I have to "ungroup" the text and then add it back as a separate text item.  Don't like that solution since I have hundreds of these in my presentations.  I would have expected Presenter '13 to be equivalent in this area.  But it's not.  So what I will likely do is just delete the group and then add the Web page as a link in the Resources.  

Jim Powell

I switched to Studio 13 from Trainersoft.  I have tens of thousands of hours of courses I've built over the last 13 years (since Trainer version 1.0).  I have an image directory with tens of thousands of files.  I have a pdf directory with thousands of files.  In trainersoft when I distribute the course to a SCORM package it includes all the supporting image files, including local pdf's and local jpgs that are linked to on a page.

I've been building my courses in Presenter for the last 100 hours and just came up for air today to check things out more thoroughly.  To my horror I discovered that ... all my courses uploaded to the server fine, and runs fine... EXCEPT when it comes to hyperlinks.

If I have an image such as "leslie_lowres.jpg"  and then I have another image that's a hyperlink from the original image "leslie_highres.jpg" and it doesn't work.   The lowres image works because it's been inserted into the powerpoint slide, but when you click on the image, it fails. The LMS points the student to my local hard drive, even though the original image pasted into slide (lowres) works fine.

After half an hour on a support-chat we finally got to the bottom of this... it's can't be done.... I have to keep track of every single image on every single page  that has to be linked to (thousands) and manually load them in the output directory of presenter for every one of my 50+ courses.

The output directory of presenter which has to be deleted everytime I re-sync an updated course with the LMS because there's a problem with old, vestigial pages (from the previous version) still in that directory that upload....

I thought for sure the support guy was mistaken but after reading in here and reading the posts I see that this is the way it works.  What am I missing, this seems crazy.  Thanks.

Signed,
Desperate in Tucson

Justin Grenier

Good Afternoon, Jim.

It sounds like you are hyperlinking to an image stored on your local hard disk and expecting that Articulate Presenter will (a) pull the hyperlinked image into the course and (b) create a relative hyperlink that points to the location where the hyperlinked image lives within the published content.  Please let me know if I have misunderstood your expectation.

Unfortunately, Articulate Presenter's hyperlink feature does not work this way, but there are three possible workarounds you could pursue:

  1. You could attach resources to the player rather than hyper-linking to them.
  2. You could follow the steps in the Hyperlinking to a file section of this Knowledge Base Article.
  3. You could upload your destination files to a Web Server (Amazon S3 and Dropbox are excellent for this sort of thing) and hyperlink to their publicly-accessible URLs there.

Please let us know if you need anything else, and have a great day!

Jim Powell

Justin, thanks for taking the time to respond.  Yes, you understand what I need to do, but either of those solutions seems an unnecessary pain in the neck.  If an ancient, primative program like Trainer can do it, I'm surprised Articulate Studio lacks this ability.

The problem has to do with workload and keeping an inventory of every image for every slide, or every pdf for every slide and then making sure they're either up on a server or in the presentation directory.

The other problem with the presentation directory solution (from the knowledge base) is that I am constantly changing and trouble-shooting my programs online, often dozens of times a day. and as part of the trouble-shooting process (i.e. with problem pages, changes, deletions) it seems a good practice to clean out the directory on the server and locally -- get rid of all the files in there, before redistributing the course to a scorm package and re-uploading.  I've had problems when I don't do that.

So now, maybe you can see the problem coming... if I've cleaned out my local and remote directory of all files, when I publish my course to a scorm page, I then have to manually go find the files I need and put them in that published, presentation directory before uploading the whole package again to the server.  It's a real pain.  As kludgy (is that a word?)  as trainersoft is, it can at least do this.

As for attaching the resources to the play, yeah, maybe, but I have hundreds of students  going through the programs and their not likely to notice the resources option... besides, my goal is to do something simple like "Click on any of the images on this page to get a higher-resolution picture of what you're looking at..." or something along those lines.

Do you know if this functionaly is even on the radar at Articulate?

Thanks Justin and everyone.

Jim

Jim Powell

I've went through this an it doesn't work for Presenter 13.  Evidently it's only a storyline functionality.  Thanks for your reply, but does anyone know of a simply way (like the link posted above that doesn't [seem to] work for Presenter). 

Seems like a simple idea -- zoom in on an image.  I have over a thousand images in over 50 courses. There should be some easy way to do this.  The problem with inserting an Articulate Engage object is the system overhead and that fact that, hey, all I want to insert is an image and have people zoom in on it to read it.

Why wouldn't this be a core function of Presenter 13?

Thanks everyone, as bad as the news is for me, at least I'm getting a response, which is great compared to what I had with Outstart.

So, Justin -- you responded to Phil's post... but that doesn't have anything to do with my situation right?  I'm using Presenter 13 not storyline 13. 

Hey folks, At least I'm learning alot. Hopefully I'll be able to get these frustrating issues out of the way and will be able to help others, eventually, in this forum.   Studio seems to do a lot of things very well, it's way easier and less buggy than Trainersoft.

Jim

Justin Grenier

Hello again, Jim.

I'm sorry for the confusion.  Yes, Zoom Picture is a feature of Storyline and not Presenter.  I believe Phil was mentioning that Storyline might be a better fit than Presenter for the functionality you are seeking, and I was making sure you could find the feature so you could make that determination yourself.

As for why this wouldn't be a core function of Presenter '13, I'm not involved with our product design process, but I imagine the factors involved would include, but not necessarily be limited to, the following:

  • The Hyperlink feature is a function of PowerPoint, not Presenter.
  • Even if it's possible, it probably would not be wise for Articulate to re-engineer PowerPoint's Hyperlink feature so that it does something different (pull the hyperlinked image into the course and create a relative hyperlink that points to the location where the hyperlinked image lives within the published content) from what Microsoft intended it to do (hyperlink to a file that already exists elsewhere).
  • Even if Articulate were able to reasonably re-engineer PowerPoint's Hyperlink feature so that it does something different from what Microsoft intended it to do, given that yours is the first request I've seen for this functionality, I'm not certain that this is the functionality our clients are generally expecting to see from PowerPoint's Hyperlink feature.

Again, I'm not really a decision-maker on this, so you and I debating why a given feature works a certain way probably isn't productive.  Nonetheless, your input is important, and we always welcome Feature Requests!

Karyn Aberts

Hi -

When I upgraded to 13 it looks like any hyperlinks I had that went to another slide within the presentation are no longer working.  I went to the page Leslie had suggested above it doesn't say that you cannot link to a "place in this document", but it doesn't say you can either.

I need to see about how to make all thee hyperlinks work or all of these courses are somewhat useless the way I have them set up.  The learner has the option of taking the complete course or going directly to the test to test out and right now, you cannot get directly to the test from the hyperlink.

How can I make this work?


Thanks

Justin Grenier

Good Morning, Karyn.

You may find that hyperlinks that jump from one slide to another in the same presentation no longer work after upgrading from Articulate Presenter '09 to Articulate Presenter '13.

This is a known issue. To correct it, re-link each hyperlink that jumps to a Place in This Document. Then republish your course.

Please let us know if you need anything else, and have a great day!

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