How do I control links to Excel?

[y_not_ton_y]

I have a presentation which has many links to an Excel spreadsheet.

This all works fine until I email a copy to a colleague at which point the links fail.

I have tried zipping the file (containing the presentation and spreadsheet) and sending the two files seperatley for the recipient to create a file of the same name in which to save them.

in both cases the liinks fail to work - I did think that I'd be able to shorten the link address from "C:/Documents & settiings/Tony/desktop/presentation"
to simply "desktop/presentation" but I can't seem to find a way to do this.

Can anyone please advise?

Many thanks

Tony

[Doctor]

Tony

This is a challenge as PowerPoint is looking for an absolute path.

There are two ways around this. The first is to make sure that the spreadsheet is saved in the same directory as the powerpoint file. This means that the files have to be first extracted from the zip file. However this is not always in your control and sometimes people try to open the presentation from within the unzip programme.

The second approach is to use a product like WinZip self extractor that will put the files into a named directory with a fixed path like "C:/desktop/presentation"
This works well but obviously the files are not in the My Documents directory

Hope this helps

[y_not]

I understand where you're coming from - my thought was to reduce the location path but I'm at a loss as to how to edit the link address.

With regard to your first suggestion, sadly I have to send the presentation to a number of senior managers who, how do I put this politely, ... don't necessarily have a good grasp of even zip folders (if you understand my meaning).

The logic was to allow them to enter figures into a simple spreadsheet then give a pre-prepared presentation based on the figures that they entered. Last time I trid this (nearly a year ago) I spent a complete morning re-establishing the links.

Any help with editing the links would be greatly appreciated.

[Doctor]

The alternative would be to build the presentation in Excel.

If you turn off the gridlines Tools > Options > View > Gridlines it can have a white screen and look a little like PowerPoint. Do one "slide" on each tab.
You can then add in hyperlinks to the next tab.

It is much more fiddly than powerpoint to get the formatting right, but with patience it can lead to an integrated "presentation"/ worksheet. You can still use images and large text.

For one project that was the only option to get the results that I wanted.