You gotta be kidding me

So two trivial bits of knowledge I learned today made me slap my forehead and start this blog. Each was a how could I not know that experience.

In defense of goto...

When displaying a PowerPoint presentation I can type the page number (and an enter) while presenting and immediately jump to that slide. Nothing shows up on the display saying I entered 47 and skipped those extra marketing slides (that would be slides 2-46 in a common presentation deck) and moved immediately to the meat of the presentation.

This, for me, was a *duh* moment. It makes perfect sense, but I never picked it up and would click, click, click my way to skip slides.

The downside is, of course, that I have to prepare enough to know the slide numbers instead of "somewhere down there". At least I'd want to have a quick list of likely jump-to slides. I can certainly see where knowing this would have been really useful back when I was doing training classes and did have well organized decks.

Hidden in plain sight...

So in the process of faking mouse-over pop-ups on PowerPoint, I had the need to introduce a number of almost duplicate slides. (Yes, I could have used internal code, but this is a deck for a client and I don't want to count on the environment it will be run in.)

However, I only want to see these slides when using the mouse over--not when just clicking through the presentation in the normal order.

The *duh*scovery was that simply by doing a right-click hide-slide on the popped-up version of the slide, I would miss them in the normal order. I had foolishly been thinking that if I hid the slide it would be hidden for all purposes. Not so--it can still be the target of a hyperlink, and that allows it to join in the collusion presenting the apparent pop-up and still stay out of the way.

Another solution would be to cluster all the "special slides" at the beginning (or end) of the presentation and use "Set Up Show" under the Slide Show menu to start the presentation somewhere other than slide one. The only drawback I see here is that the variant slides are then separated in the deck from the initial slides, so it might be easier to miss related slides at update time.