Hidden Menu for Testing a Restricted Menu

Greeting SL developers. Today I wanted to share something I recently put some more work into that comes in handy when testing a project that requires a restricted Menu. This can be a valuable time saver when you get to the testing and refining stage of a project! I starting developing it after working on a project where disabling the restricted menu option for testing was not really an option. Sections of the course had to be tested with the menu restricted and it ate up time going through large sections just to get to the slide you made changes to.

You can use this hidden menu to jump around your course by setting the buttons within it to go where you need to. Each button can have a custom label that you can set by editing the value of the corresponding variable. The menu can be set to be accessed via set click positions or by pressing “Ctrl + Shift + M”.

In the first version of this, I used a 3 hot spot technique to open the menu that is as simple to set up as placing the 3 hot spots above 3 points on the opening page that you and whomever else is working on the course will remember to click to open. The 3 spots have to be clicked in the order of circle, square then octagon to show the menu. These are set so there is no indicating mouse-over that they are there. This is so the client can test without knowing (unless you want them to know) that there is a shortcut menu. “Ctrl + Shift + M” does the same thing, and was added after the 3 click method. So you can use either or both.

To change the roll-over labels on the buttons simply go into the “manage project variables” section and edit the corresponding variable values. Variables for these roll-overs are “Link_Label_1” through “Link_Label_17”.

To edit links, click on the view tab and click the “Slide Master View” button. Select the main master slide at the top (as shown above) and in the triggers window you should see the trigger you need to set (as shown below).

I made this in SL2 and if you have any questions or suggestions I'd love to hear them. I plan on making a more efficient version of this using JavaScript in the future to try to get the menu buttons to automatically link to the slides in the order you add them as you develop your course.