Using Content Links To Get Around In Your Documents

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how you can setup your documents to easily navigate around inside them.

Now sometimes we work with large documents in Keynote, Pages, and Numbers. It can be hard to navigate around inside them either while you're working on them or as a finished document. But there are ways to setup Tables of Contents and Links inside these documents to make it easier.

So, for instance, let's start off here in Keynote. If you have a large presentation, imagine one much larger than this, you can navigate around pretty easily using the left sidebar. Here you should have it set to Navigator. If you have it set to Slide Only you won't see it. But with Navigator you can easily move around, select any slide, and jump right to it. But you can also do this while presenting. So if I play this slideshow here and I'll do it in a window so you can see it very easily as a separate window here, you'll also get your Presenter display. So I'm going to Play and then Show Presenter Display in window. I have my presenter display in one window and I've got the presentation in another window. You may actually have it setup where the presentation is filling the entire screen and your presenter display is in another screen, like the screen on your MacBook where this is the screen in the front of the room. 

So you can setup the presenter display to have the same little sidebar here and be able to jump around in your presentation. This is really useful as your presentation isn't necessarily linear, you just want to jump around in it to whatever slide you want to talk about right now.

But you can also setup your presentation with buttons to allow you to jump around, kind of a Table of Contents or navigation system. So I'm going to add an extra slide here at the beginning. I'm going to actually move it to the first slide. You can add a link to some text in a textbox or you can add it to a shape. I'm going to create a little rounded rectangle here as a button. With this button selected I can go to Format and Add Link and add a link to a slide. You saw Command K is the shortcut there. We're going to see Command K a lot. So you can have it go to the next slide, the previous slide, first, last, or last slide viewed. In other words go back or a specific slide number. So you can have this, say, jump to Slide 4 or Slide 1, however you want it. Then you can actually put text in here and you can just click here and go to that slide.

If you're doing the presentation, so I'll play the slideshow here and it plays in a window, just one click is what's needed. You don't need to do that second step. Now imagine on this slide you create an entire Table of Contents that jumps to specific slides, perhaps the beginning of different sections of your presentation. Not only that but on a specific slide or every slide, if you like, you can add a button that actually goes back. I'm going to use a circle shape here and I can use that Command K to go to the first slide, like that. So now I have a way to go back to that first slide and then a whole bunch of other links take me into other slides. So you can make it very easy to navigate around in your presentation like this. You can even run your presentation on a compute and let somebody else click on the buttons to navigate around in an interactive presentation.

If you find these videos valuable consider joining the more than 2000 others that support MacMost through Patreon. You get exclusive content, course discounts, and more. You can read about it at macmost.com/patreon.

Now in Pages you have tons of options. For instance, here in the sample document I have set the style for each Heading here as Heading Style and the rest as Body Text. So if I wanted to create a Table of Contents I could just go to Insert, Table of Contents for the document like that. It is going to look for all of the headings, there are eight of them, and create a Table of Contents. I can select the Table of Contents here and I can customize the style, so it is just using Headings but it can use Heading and Heading Two an Heading Three if I wanted to. This does work to jump to different sections. So I can jump to Page 10 by just clicking on number 10. This works even if you export, let's say as an EPUB or a PDF. This could be a way to help you get around in your document but also a way for somebody else reading it later as a published document to be able to navigate around.

However you don't need to create a Table of Contents just for you to navigate around while you're writing. Under View here you can choose Table of Contents as the Sidebar. You don't actually need this. I can delete the Table of Contents completely here. It still will use, under Edit here, Heading, or Heading two or Heading three, whatever you want, to fill this out. You can use this to jump around inside your document. Superhandy for while you are writing.

Another way to do this is using Bookmarks. This helps if everything isn't structured perfectly. I could select something, like I'm going to select this heading here, and I'm going to insert a Bookmark, Option Command B. This creates a Bookmark. I don't need to do anything else but here at the beginning I can say Insert a Page Break or let's do a Section Break. So I have this empty one page section here. I could have something here, select it, and then do a Link just like before. But one of the links I can choose is to a Bookmark. When I select this I get to choose the bookmark. You can see that that Bookmark I defined before is in the list. So now I can click here and click Go To Bookmark. If this was a PDF I exported it wouldn't have that second step. It would just jump right to it. The great thing about this is it doesn't have to be a heading. I can select any text and create bookmarks anywhere I want and jump to them. So I can define exactly what I want to be here. I can even use this while writing to jump to sections perhaps where I want to get back to later on.

As you expect there is another way to get to Bookmarks. In the Documents Sidebar there's a section here called Bookmarks and you can use this to jump around your bookmarks while you're working on your document. So you can just define Bookmarks where you want them to be and then use this to get there.

Plus you may have noticed something here when I went to add the link for a bookmark there was a set of suggestions. You can use this to define different styles, we're just going to use the Heading here for suggested bookmarks. So now in addition to Bookmarks you define you can also use the suggestions. So I can choose, say, this Chapter 3 right here. I didn't have to create the bookmark in advance. It automatically suggested it as a bookmark because it had the Heading style. Plus, now we can also have links back to this first page here. So I'll do something like, Table of Contents, like this. Let's change this to a different format here, like just regular body text. But I'm going to actually create a bookmark here, I'm just going to do Insert, and then Bookmark there to make this a bookmark. Now at the end of this section here if I want to have a way for the reader to be able to jump back to the Table of Contents I can do something like that, select it, Command K, and use bookmark, and then select that Table of Contents bookmark I created. So now when somebody reads this and gets to the end they have a way to click and then return back to the top.

Of course Pages has two modes; word processing mode and page layout mode. If we do Page Layout Mode here we can create independent pages and say we're creating a four page newsletter. But probably a lot more pages if you're going to have some sort of navigation system. So you can, on this first page, have a piece of text or a button like this shape here that has something in it. Then I can just select the shape and I can do Command K and notice Link To now has page here. I can set it to a page number. So I could have this link to page 4. I can have a link on page 4 that goes back to page 1. So you can produce a PDF, for instance, that has a navigation system allowing people to jump to different pages using buttons or the links in text.

What about Numbers? You can actually do some of this in Numbers as well. The main element for navigation are Sheets. So in this sample document here I've created just a bunch of different sheets here just with some sample tables in there. You can just use the Sheets List here at the top to jump to the sheets that you want. In the Window Menu you've got some keyboard shortcuts for Previous Sheet, Next Sheet, First Sheet, and Last Sheet. But you don't have a list of sheets anywhere except here in this bar at the top. But you can create your own little Table of Contents. I'm going to create a new sheet here. I'm going to drag it so its first and I'll all this Contents. I can do this inside a table with text or I can do it with textboxes. I'm going to use buttons. I'm going to use little shapes here and I can add this link, say, to Goals. I can select the shape, do Command K, and you can link to a sheet. Then it gives you the names of the sheets, like this. So now I can click here and it will jump to that sheet. Likewise, I can have a Back Button. So I could do something like, you know, this arrow here and I'll point it the other way. Put it at the bottom right hand corner, Command K, and I'll have this link to sheet and then Select Contents. So now I've got a way to go to Goals, like that. Then a way to go back to the Contents. It's a little awkward that you always have to use this little menu here, Edit or Go To Sheet at least while you're working. But if you were to actually, say, export this as a PDF with all the sheets in it then these buttons should work just as a regular clicks to jump around.

So I hope this gives you some idea of how to use elements like a Table of Contents, Bookmarks, and Links to be able to get around inside your documents both while you're working on them and also after they have been exported as PDF's for others to use. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.