Interesting Twist with Email Hyperlinks
Feb 21, 2011
I've been having a bear of a time adding a slide with email hyperlinks at the end of my course (I want it to pre-populate both the subject and body of the message).
I've posted about this before, and received this great response from Brian Batt:
When you add the hyperlink, instead of choosing "link to email address", choose Existing File or Web Page. Then, in the address, put the following:
mailto:you@yourdomain.com?subject=Your Subject&body=Message for the body
Click the OK button and then publish your presentation. I just tested this in PowerPoint 2007 and it worked perfectly.
And it does work perfectly - the first time. If I edit the course and republish, all the hyperlinks are broken. If I go through and redo all the hyperlinks, using the process above, they will work again.
I'm currently working with a list of about 36 emails, so the process is terribly tedious and time-consuming. Has anyone else run into this? Anyone know a work-around? Is there something I'm missing, or is this a bug with Articulate (if I run the slide in Power Point presentation mode, it works just fine).
I'll continue what I'm doing for now, but I was curious about others' experiences.
5 Replies
Hi Michelle- I just tested this in PowerPoint 2007 and Presenter '09, and could not duplicate the issue you describe - the hyperlink to email still works on second publish after an edit.
However, one work-around you might consider is leveraging the Web Object feature of Presenter - that is, build a simple HTML page on your computer that lists all the email addresses using the same syntax as noted, then embed that Web Object. You'll need to place the index.html file in a folder, then point to that folder on your computer via Articulate -> Web Object.
Would that work for you?
If you'd rather use the in-slide method, you could upload your project to us for review (first, create a Presenter Package).
I will continue working with the Web Object work-around, but I'm sending the package as well. Yesterday, when testing the current draft after publishing, my supervisor pulled up email with no info - the email address fills in, but the subject & message are blank.
However, when I run the program, the email still populates perfectly, exactly as intended, with spaces and carriage breaks.
At this point, I'm stumped. I'll try to create a web object (and look at it as a chance to improve my HTML skills), but I'd still like to figure out what's going wrong between my computer and his.
Sounds good, Michelle. I'm sure our support team will help you out.
Do you and your supervisor use the same web browser / version and email client? That could potentially be part of the issue.
We do use the same email client (Outlook 2007), but he prefers Internet Explorer while I use Firefox.
I just tested the course in Internet Explorer, and no problems. I'm doing the last round of edits on the course now and will be sending it out to testers this afternoon - I'm interested to hear how it works for them.
Hmm... well good luck, Michelle, and let us know how it goes! It looks like our support team was not able to reproduce the issue with your content, either (Case #00209159). It could be something specific to your supervisor's machine.
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