Presentation Navigation Explained

A web presentation or course that you publish with iSpring inherits the behavior of the original PowerPoint presentation. However, it has a few advantages; for example, a presentation player with buttons and a sidebar.

This article will tell you everything about the slide navigation settings available in PowerPoint and iSpring.

Set up the navigation the way you want before you publish, because you will need to re-publish it and upload to your website or LMS again to make changes.

PowerPoint navigation

When you view your presentation in PowerPoint by clicking Slide Show or pressing F5, just click on a slide area or use any of these buttons on your keyboard: Space, Enter, Page Down, or right arrow (→). Any of these actions will advance your presentation’s animation steps. Click Page Up, Backspace or left arrow (←) to go back.

Also, you can use the right-click menu to access the list of all slides and select a specific slide to go to.

As you go through your presentation, you may click on hyperlinks that will bring you to another slide, including those that you have already visited.

Slide advance

A regular presentation will advance to the next slide if you click anywhere on the slide (as long as that area doesn’t already contain a clickable element, like a hyperlink or player control).

You can set up an automatic slide advance time on the TRANSITIONS tab. Next to the After checkbox, enter the number of minutes and seconds (and hundredths of seconds after the decimal point). You can select multiple slides on the sidebar and apply the the slide advance setting to the selection.

In some cases, you can turn off both of these options on a slide, but be careful—these slides should have hyperlinks to go somewhere else. Apply this setting if you are planning to create your own navigation buttons on the slide.

iSpring presentation navigation

A web presentation or LMS course that you publish with iSpring will use the PowerPoint slide advance settings. If you apply contradictory settings in iSpring, they will override the initial PowerPoint behavior in the published presentation.

Presentation Explorer navigation

You can easily customize the navigation type in the Advance column of the Presentation Explorer.

Global Playback and Navigation settings

To quickly change the slide advance setting for all slides, you can use Playback and Navigation options in the Publish Presentation window. For example, you can set all slides to advance automatically, and auto play for animations that require a mouse click.

These settings override the Presentation Explorer settings for individual slides.

Presentation player buttons

If you publish your presentation with the default presentation player layout, you will get a navigation bar with buttons. You can set the PREV and NEXT buttons in the presentation player to advance:

• Animation steps. It’s the standard PowerPoint behavior, similar to clicking on a slide.

• Slides. In this case you might miss some animations.

On the iSpring ribbon, go to Publish -> General tab -> Customize (where it says Player: Universal). Select Bottom Bar at the top and then set the Navigation type to By slides or By animations.

Learn more about animation steps →

Keyboard navigation

You can advance slides with the Page Up and Page Down buttons and change animations by clicking the right (→) or left (←) arrow keys.

To turn on this option, go to Publish -> Playback and Navigation tab -> check Enable keyboard navigation.

It differs from the PowerPoint slideshow, where you can use multiple keys to advance. Here, in the web presentation, you can assign only one key to a certain action.

Learn more about customizing control keys →

Note: Remote controls for switching slides simulate default keystrokes; for example, Page Down or right arrow to advance slides. If you want your remote control to work with a web presentation, turn on keyboard navigation and configure the keys.

No presentation player

You can publish your presentation without a player by selecting the None player on the General tab when publishing. In this case, your presentation won’t have any navigation buttons and sidebars.

We recommend that you leave the option to advance slides by mouse click or create your own navigation buttons on the slides.

Restrict skipping slides

iSpring has additional options for online courses to prevent cheating. For example, you can apply Limited navigation. In this case, a learner doesn’t have the option to skip slides before their duration is complete. However, there is an option to go back and forth within the already visited material to recap.

Check out more cases of limited navigation →

Summary

Now you know about all the slide advance options in PowerPoint and iSpring. The iSpring navigation settings will not change your original PowerPoint slideshow settings, but will be applied after publishing only.

Many presentations have on-slide animations. Like the slide itself, an animation on a slide may also be advanced on click or automatically.

Read the next article about animation steps and slide animation states to understand how presentation timing works.