PowerPoint Hyperlinks Won't Work!

There are two main reasons why internal hyperlinks fail to work in PowerPoint presentations.

Commas

If you place a comma in the Title of the slide to link to, then chances are the link will refuse to work. To understand why you need to know how PowerPoint stores the link data.

The data for the internal link is stored in the HyperLink.SubAddress in the form
SlideID, SlideIndex,Title. Notice the two commas splitting the data. Now if your Title has another comma ....

PowerPoint sees something like 263,3,The evolution of presentations, Darwin to 2007

Three commas, oh no somethings wrong, do nothing!

The most common sulution is to either take the comma out and relink OR make a fake title holder with a comma and drag the real title (without commas off slide). Thanks to Trish I now know another way!

Trish: "Your title needs a comma"

Me: "A comma will break it!"

Trish: "I'm telling you there should be a comma"

About 100 reps later

Me "OK, I'll put it in"

Now the link didn't break! Why not - because the SubAddress was still set to the old title without the comma and because the title data is not really needed the link will still work perfectly - even with the new "REQUIRED" comma.

Sub Address

So the sub address seems to be set when the link is made and doesn't change if you change the slide index or title. The slide ID is to all intents and purposes fixed anyway.

Make the link with a title that works and then change the title without remaking the link.

The Other Problem

Before 2007 version there was a tight fixed amount of starage for the subaddress data. Go beyond it and links would die left, right and centre. If you look at my first sub address (and yes I did see it for real) it's obvious that title length is important.

So bearing in mind my (Trish's!) discovery you could make lots of links with one letter titles and then swap all the titles to longer ones if you really need to! If you try blank titles then PowerPoint will make up it's own title so don't do this.

We have an experimental Add In that can squash the data even further. It can't fix broken links though, you need to squash BEFORE the problems start. If you would like a demo email me (see contact page) and mention HyperSquash.

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