Custom Buttons, the Slide master and using variables

Hi Nancy,

I am not sure of there is a way to change the state of a button in a slide when it has been inserted on the Master slide (I have been unable to find a solution). However, what I have done in the attached example is to place the Previous button on the Master and inserted the Next button on the slide itself.

The Next button has an initial state of Hidden and a trigger changes the state to Normal when the media completes. The media, in this case, is a short piece of audio to replicate your voiceover.

Hope this helps.

Hi Nancy, if all the voiceovers finished same time as timeline ends, you can have the custom button put on master slide and add a trigger to change the state to normal when timeline ends.

So you can do this using variables and triggers on the master slides, however it will only work if your forward and previous buttons have the same function on each slide (i.e. they only go to previous or next slides).

This is how I have done it in a lot of projects I do:

1. Add your buttons to the master in whatever state you want them (i.e. hidden)
2. Create a variable called something like "nextactive" which has a true/false setting and is set to False by default (you can use a number variable and use 0's and 1's as well)
3. The following 2 triggers need to go on your master slide:
   1. Trigger 1:
      1. Action: Adjust variable - Set 'nextactive' to value 'False'
      2. When: The 'timelines starts' on 'this slide'
      3. Conditions: If 'nextactive' = value 'True'
   2. Trigger 2:
      1. Action: Change state of 'buttonname' to 'Normal'
      2. When: The 'timeline starts' on 'this slide' (you may need to change this to when 'nextactive' variable changes for your project)
      3. Conditions: If 'nextactive' = value 'True'
4. On your individual slides you will then have a trigger like this:
   1. Action: Adjust variable - Set 'nextactive' to value 'True'
   2. When: Media Complete 'medianame'

With some luck that should do it for you.  Just to explain the first trigger has to set the variable back to false otherwise the change state trigger won't work because the variable is already set to true.  As it sits on the slide master it will get applied to every slide which means you don't have to change the variable back to false on every slide.

I use this in a slightly different way but the principles should be the same.  Hope this helps.