Presenter 360: Adding Interactivity with Hyperlinks and Branching

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to add interactivity to Articulate Presenter 360 courses using hyperlinks and branching.

Watch this video demonstration, then follow the activities below to practice.

Practice Activities:

1. Use Hyperlinks to Control Navigation
2. Use Slide Properties to Add Branching
3. Preview Your Branched Interaction

Practice Activity: Use Hyperlinks to Control Navigation

Presenter 360 supports PowerPoint hyperlinks between slides. It’s a great way to add interactivity to your courses, allowing learners to take control of their own navigation.

In this activity, we’ll use hyperlinks to create a menu slide.

1. Open the PowerPoint folder in your practice files, then open the Branching_Interaction_Practice1.pptx file.
2. On slide 1, right-click the notebook icon and choose Hyperlink.
3. Select Place in This Document on the left side of the hyperlink window.
4. Select the Notebook slide and click OK.
5. Repeat these steps to add similar hyperlinks to the clipboard and map icons.

Before we test our hyperlinks, we need to add branching to the previous/next buttons in the activity below.

For details on Presenter 360 support for PowerPoint hyperlinks, see this article.

Practice Activity: Use Slide Properties to Add Branching

Not only can you control navigation with hyperlinks from one slide to another, but you can also change the destinations of the previous and next buttons on your course player.

By default, the previous button on the Presenter 360 player sends learners to the slide they just viewed, and the next button goes to the next consecutive slide in the course. But you can branch the previous and next buttons to any slide in your course, or you can turn them off for individual slides.

In this activity, we'll change how slides advance, turn off the previous/next buttons for some slides, and add branching.

1. Go to the Articulate tab on the PowerPoint ribbon and click Slide Properties.
2. Press Ctrl+A to select all your slides, then click the Advance property on the right side of the screen. It'll change from Automatically to By user.
3. Next, select just slide 1, then branch the Next button to the last slide in your course.
4. Shift+click slides 2-5 to select them, then branch the Previous button to the first slide in your course.
5. With slides 2-5 still selected, turn off the Next button by unchecking it in the Properties panel on the right side of the screen.
6. Click OK to close the Slide Properties window.

To learn more about working with slide properties, see this user guide.

Practice Activity: Preview Your Branched Interaction

Hyperlinks and branching may not work as expected during preview unless you preview all slides at once.

Let’s test the interactive scenario we’ve built in this tutorial.

1. Go to the Articulate tab on the PowerPoint ribbon.
2. Click the Preview drop-down arrow and choose Preview Range of Slides.
3. Click the Select All link in the lower right corner of the window and click OK.
4. Click each icon on the menu slide, then use the previous button to return to the menu slide.

Tip: When testing real-world scenarios, we recommend publishing your course to properly test hyperlinks and branched scenarios.

Summary

In this tutorial, you learned how to control navigation using hyperlinks and how to create branched scenarios using slide properties.

In the next tutorial, we’ll customize the course player that appears around the perimeter of your slides.