Perhaps you’ve experimented with interactive presentation techniques in PowerPoint and have discovered the importance of using shapes when building navigation elements. The adventurous presenter eventually goes on to try Invisible Navigation, where those navigation shapes are made completely invisible. In that case, the slide pane seems to contain nothing but content. Only the presenter knows that secret navigation ‘hot spots’ are available if needed.

For example, as speaker might designate the upper right corner of slides as a place to click when a particular action is required—such as displaying an objection-handling slide, jumping to conclusion slides, opening another presentation, or animating a hidden menu into view. Because the navigation shape is invisible, that upper right corner won’t appear special at all to viewers, but a click in this area will perform the desired action nevertheless.

When building invisible navigation, what is the best way to make a shape invisible? Probably 99 out of a 100 people will first remove the shape’s outline, a necessary step, and then remove the shape’s fill by choosing No Fill in the Shape Fill area. Removing the shape’s fill does indeed make the shape invisible, but you can use a better approach.

Rather than removing fill color, leave the fill in and make it transparent instead. Doing so offers two important advantages when shapes are used for navigation. First, shapes containing fill are easier to select with a click. Shapes without fill must be clicked exactly on their border to be selected, a difficult task when you can’t even see where the border is to click it.

Second, shapes without fill do not work well when used for navigation elements. Certainly you can add a hyperlink to a shape that doesn’t contain fill. The hyperlink will work just fine on the original slide where the shape was made and linked. However, a problem arises when try to copy that invisible hyperlinked shape and paste it onto another slide (a very common occurrence with most navigation styles). The link, in that case, will show up on the shape’s border and nowhere else. In other words, clicking anywhere inside the invisible shape will not fire off the hyperlink as expected. You definitely want to avoid this situation.

Just get in the habit of leaving the fill in shapes and making it transparent. In PowerPoint 2007, click the More Fill Colors button and then slide the transparency slider all the way to the right. A similar transparency slider exists in PowerPoint 2003, as well, in the fill area of the Format Autoshape dialog box.

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