Slideshow Navigation

[foto1]

Greetings,

Has anyone figured out how to make a function for the "Go to slide number..." where you can use it during a created show to jump to any number you wish?

Example: You are on slide 10 and you decide would like to go back and review slide 4 so you click on the "jump to Slide #" button and type 4 and hit enter. Then you decde to jump ahead to # 15 you hit the same button and type 15 etc.

I hope I typed my desire clearly.

thanks,

Dan, foto1

Vista

PTE 5.6.4

[Lin Evans]

Hi Dan,

It doesn't work exactly like that. The way it works is you create a menu which has buttons. Each button represents a slide number.

This works very well as long as you don't have an excessive number of slides to jump to. Some time ago I created an example of this. The easiest way is to place your "jump to" menu as the last slide. You may place a blank slide before this "last slide" so you can manually stop the show before the last slide shows.

On each slide you may place an invisible button which you can click on - or even just program a mouse click on each slide to pull up the "jump to" menu. Then you simply click on the appropriate number on the "go to" menu and that slide is immediately selected and displayed.

Being able to enter a number via the keyboard would be nice, but the program isn't designed to be interactive in that way.

The practical limit as to how many slides you can jump to via the menu is determined more or less by the memory resources available on the system you use to build the menu. Each "button" on the menu is a separate object. As you are programming, PTE has to keep track of each command so you can "undo" and "redo" if you make an error. This begins to impact the memory after about 20 or 30 objects so when you are building your "Jump To" menu it would be wise to save, completely exit PTE and reopen after about 20 objects to avoid a crash. Unfortunately, there is no way around this, however, PTE can handle hundreds if not thousands of objects. I have made shows with as many as 1000 objects and the shows run fine but making them can become tedious.

Of course the "practical" consideration of having a single menu with say 100 objects becomes problematic for space considerations. Also remember that if you do this should you add or delete a slide, you will have a "sequence" issue because the slide you add will appropriate the sequence number which is represented by the position of that slide. This will then push the slide after into the next available slot number. So if you had a particular slide as number 10 and the total was 20 slides and you added a slide at position 9, now nine becomes 10, 10 becomes 11.......20 becomes 21.

Best regards,

Lin

Later:

I made you a test show using this approach. Open the linked PTE zipped file in Beta 5.7 (it won't open in 5.6.4).

Here is how it was done. The "Go To Slide Menu" was created with 30 buttons. Each button is programmed to go to the slide number written on the button. I called the slide numbers to be displayed at the top center of each slide so you can check the accuracy of the program - that is you can see which slide number is called by the menu.

I removed the "Pause" button from the Navigation Bar because it is no longer needed. The show is set to do nothing unless a mouse click is detected. You can use the navigation bar to go forward a slide, backward or go to "home" (first slide). If you click the left mouse button anywhere on the slide "except" on one of the Navigation Bar Icons, the "Go To Slide Menu" will appear. You can then click any number on the Menu and that slide will appear.

Each slide was set to respond to a mouse click by going to slide 30. Slide 30 is the Menu. Just before the menu for slide 29 I placed a blank so if you are simply navigating by the Navigation Bar the show would effectively "end" at slide 29. Press ESC to exit the show. Try compiling this to an executable with Beta 5.7 and you will see how it works or just use the "Preview" feature. Study how the buttons are programmed, etc., to get a feel for how to do this for your own shows.

http://www.learntomakeslideshows.net/sample/testshow.zip

and the executable zip for those who don't yet use the beta.

http://www.learntomakeslideshows.net/sample/testshowexe.zip

Lin