Jump Around in a Keynote Presentation With Buttons

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to make Keynote presentations that are more dynamic than just going from slide to slide. 

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Now typically when you make a presentation in Keynote or any presentation app you're going to go from slide 1 to slide 2 to slide 3 and so on until you reach the end. But sometimes what you're presenting calls for something different. Sometimes you want to be able to use the same slides but in a different order or to be able to present whatever slide comes to mind while you're talking. You can create buttons in Keynote to jump to any slide you want.

So as an example here I've got a presentation where the first slide is just a series of pictures here. Say your presentation is about the team that you're working with. Then each slide after that is about each individual member. Now you could just start on this slide and then go through each one. But in some situations you may want to start here and then jump to this slide and then go back to the picture of the team to talk about everybody and then go to this slide and so on. You want to do it in any order you want. Now you could use the Navigation tools inside of Keynote to do this. But you also build this directly into the presentation. 

In this first slide here let's take one of these image elements here, this one, and let's create a link so we go to the slide that matches this photo. So with the element selected I'm going to go to Format and then Add A Link. I have several options here but the one I want to use is Add a Slide Link. Note that the keyboard shortcut is Command K. It's going to be a lot easier to use the Keyboard shortcut each time. So by selecting that I can now link to a slide and I can choose Next Slide, Previous Slide, First, Last, Last Slide Viewed, or Slide Number. I'm going to choose the slide number here and it is slide 2 that I want to go to. So I can use the Drop Down Menu or I can simply type the number 2. Now I don't need to do anything else except click away and you can see how now it shows me there is a link there. That won't appear while I'm presenting. 

Let's go to this slide here and I want a way to get it back to the first slide. So what I can do here is create a button that will link back to the slide. I can do anything I want to create the button. I can have a piece of text. I can use a shape. I can use an image. That image could be something I created that looks like a really cool back button. I'm just going to do something simple. Just use an arrow here. I'm going to drag the right side to the left there to reverse the arrow and put it down here in the bottom right hand corner. With that shape selected I'm going to do the same thing to Add A Link. So I'm going to go to Format, Add Link, Slide and then I can do various things here. 

One is I can say go to the First slide. What that will do is always go to the first slide. That's probably not the best thing because what if I add a Title slide before this. It would go before that. Or what if this wasn't the first slide but was slide 7 and these were slides 8, 9, and 10 and so on. Better to use the slide number. If I use the slide number and say go to slide 1 the great thing is that will change if I insert new slides or move slides around. So if I enter a new slide as slide 1 this would automatically change to slide 2. It will go to the same slide. I could also simply have it go to the last slide viewed. So, in other words, just go back. This works great if it just is going to go to one slide and then back to the previous slide. So I'll use that in this situation. 

So now that I've got a way to get to the slide and a way to get back I'm going to go to the first slide here. Play the presentation and I only put the link on this one here so notice how the cursor changes to a hand, but only over that one picture. I click on it and it goes to this slide and then I click on the button at the bottom right and it goes back. I can continue to add that to the other elements. So, for instance, I'll select this one here. I'm going to use Command K this time and I'm going to say I want to go to slide, and in this case it is slide 4. Then on slide 4 I want to add that same back button. I can just Copy and Paste for that. So I'm going to select the back button there. Actually I can add that to every slide. So I'll go to slide 3 and add it, 4 just pasting it on every slide so it is there and ready to go. So then I can add the links to all the rest of these here and now I can jump to this slide here, go back. I can jump to this slide here, go back and if I've added the other six I continue to move dynamically around in this presentation. So in this case I can basically talk about my team in any order I want and that may change depending upon who I'm presenting to. 

There are other ways to use this as well. So I've got a presentation here and it basically just has a bunch of slides and I haven't really filled in any content. But one of the things I may want to do is here on slide 3 sometimes I might want to take a detour and talk about something else and that starts at slide 10. So normally if I'm doing a quick presentation I'll go through slides 1 through 9 and I'm done. But if I have more time on slide 3 I'll go on a detour and do slide 10, 11, and 12. I can set that up by going to slide 3 and creating a button here. So I'm just going to create a simple circle button. I could put text in this if I want. I can make it a different color. I can use an image. Whatever it is I want to do. I'm going to put it here at the bottom left and I'm going to use Command K and say, Jump to slide 10. Now that is a little button that I can use instead of using spacebar or clicking anywhere to go to the next slide I can jump to slide 10. 

Slide 10 could have my 3 slides here and then let's add another button, I'll just put a little rounded rectangle, and put that at the bottom left and then set the link for that to go to slide, and that was slide 3. So now it will jump back here so I can finish my thought. I could have it jump to slide 4 if I know that I'm going to be wanting to go to the next slide as soon as I'm done this one. But I'm going to assume I'm talking about something on this slide. I want to do it for an aside for 3 other slides and then come back to this slide. So now my presentation I could just use the spacebar, go to slide 3 and continue to slide 4 OR I could use the spacebar, go to slide 3 and since I do have extra time, I could click here. Now I can go through these slides and then when I'm done I can click this button to go back to slide 3 and continue through the presentation. 

So I could have a whole bunch of different asides here at the end of my presentation that I could jump to from each of these if there is time. Let me demonstrate to you also if I were to add another slide right here, 9 and now then there is a 10, this is now slide 11. If I go back here and I look at this link you could see it now says go to slide 11. So it adjusted dynamically. I don't have to worry about the numbers being fixed and what happens if I rearrange or add new slides. 

So this is just two examples of how you can use Buttons in your Keynote presentation to dynamically move around in your slides. So I hope this gives you lots of ideas about how you can get the most out of using Mac Keynote. Thanks for watching.