When you are working in Microsoft PowerPoint you can attach material that resides outside of the PowerPoint presentation by using Hyperlinks.

With Hyperlinks you can link part of your presentation to another slide within the same presentation as separate PowerPoint presentation, a website, an email address or another file like a Word document. There’s a lot you can do and I’m going to demonstrate just a few of the Hyperlink options.

First, I’m going to link an element in my presentation to another slide later in the presentation. In this case, I’m going to create a Hyperlink for the link in this picture. I’ll just click on the picture to highlight it then go up to the Insert tab in the top navigation and select the option to Hyperlink from the links group.

In the dialog box here on the left side you can see that PowerPoint gives you four different options for linking. You can link to a separate file or web page to a different place in this document to a new document that you’ll create or to an email address. I’m going to link the picture to another slide, so I’ll choose the second option and then select the slide I want to link too and click OK.

Now, it doesn’t look like anything has change with my slide, so I need to test it by clicking up here on the Slide Show tab in the top navigation and telling it to run the presentation from the current slide. You can see when I move the cursor over the picture the arrow turns into a little hand indicating that it’s a Hyperlink, and if I click on the picture I jump to the other slide in the presentation that I link too.

Another thing you can do is link to a file outside of your presentation, so I’m going to hit escape to go back to my normal view and then click over to another slide and that the Hyperlink there to a Word document. This time I’m going to link the table which is actually a JPEG image, so I’ll click on the element that I want to link too and go back up to the Insert tab on the top menu. I’ll choose the Hyperlink button again and this time I’m going to select the first option for existing file or web page.

And to navigate my way to the file that I need I’ll select that file and click OK, and now I can test it by going up to the top menu again and choosing the Slide Show tab then starting from the current slide. Here again, you can see the cursor turns into a little hand as I hover over the picture, and when I click it actually launches another application to display the link file.

Okay, I’m going to hit escape to exit out of here one more time, and I’m going to add one more link to my presentation. This time I’m going to link to a web page, so I’ll click on the thumb nail for the slide that I want to embed my link in, and one more time select the source for my link, back up to insert the Hyperlink. And this time I’ll select the same option to insert an existing file on web page, but instead of choosing a file I’m going to enter the URL for the web page down here at the bottom and click OK.

So, let me do a quick preview to see if that works, there you go straight to the web page. I
If you ever decide you want to undo a Hyperlink, you can just highlight the source again and up in the Insert tab when you click Hyperlink select the button that says, “Remove Hyperlink” and that’s how you insert Hyperlinks into a PowerPoint presentation.