Attachment/Link woes in Presenter

Question

I'm having issues with attachments and links in Presenter. We
are publishing locally and not necessarily using the LMS to
distribute the courseware.
I have read the online help file's disclaimer and the
TechNote about attachments not working in locally-published
presentations. Is there ANY way around this? The "workaround" they
give in the technote/helpfile is not working for me (create a
hyperlink within PPT that links to the file on a network drive.) I
think I'm not fully understanding how "links" are supposed to work
within a Presenter file. Any help would be appreciated.
The two things I want to do are:
1) Have hyperlinks to our company's intranet, actually work
within Presenter slides. (These are
http:// links within the PPT slides.) They work
for me, but not for others. (Is it a Flash Player security
setting??)
2) Have users be able to launch a .PDF attachment from the
Attachments (paperclip) button. I really don't care where it's
stored -- with the Presenter file on the intranet? Somewhere on our
network? Wherever it works.
Thanks in advance to anyone who can help.

Answer 1

Rob posted the answer a while back.... here it is:
quote:
Originally posted by:
robva65
Hey folks, I just wanted to report some findings after
looking at a couple of decks from other folks. I apologize in
advance for the long reply here, but there are points that I
believe warrant explaining.
First, a couple of items to get out of the way:
1. Using Presenter 6.0 build 432, using MS PowerPoint 2007
and I published locally.
2. Set up links to pdfs, html pages and MS Word 2007, with
the word file saved as a Word 2003 with ".doc" extension.
The hyperlink method within PowerPoint needs to be massaged
just a bit in order for the pathing to be rectified when the deck
is published. As far as I can tell, what I recently discovered is
that Presenter 6.0 likes to have
ALL associated files living within the
resources folder within the
data directory of published presentations. After several
rounds of tests, here's the process I used to acheive the results
and what I found:
I set up a project file and associated directories as
mentioned in my earlier post above. Bottom line: I have a project
folder that contains my ppt deck. Within that project folder, I
have another folder called
"localPublish". Lastly, inside the localPublish directory I
created one last folder called
"extAssets". The extAssets folder contains all my external
assests (pdfs, docs, html, etc). And for the sake of being clear,
I'm hoping that its obvious to everyone that the localPublish
folder will utlimately contain the published presentation. Think of
it this way: the extAssets directory is nested in the same location
of the published deck; this way, if you have to republish your ppt
file, the contents within the extAssets folder will NEVER be messed
with!
That said, to resolve the error in pointing to a bogus url, I
simply redirected a hyperlink in powerpoint:
../../extAssets/myWordDoc.doc
Once I republished the file and tested the playback, the word
document loaded and displayed properly (after waiting for Word to
launch of course!). Bottom line, it's working, and fortunately all
it took was a redirection of the link pointing to the asset I want
to display. Also, I tried publishing 2 ways: to my project folder
as well as the default My Adobe Presentations folder.
In both cases, each presentation had resolved links to
external files.
Again, I think that Presenter 6.0 is looking for assets
originating in the resources directory by default; by using the
"../../" syntax, we're telling Presenter to look 2 directories up
and out of the Resources folder. This redirection forces the
browser to hunt down the file outside of the Data folder and should
display the file(s) successfully.
Because I absolutely hate testing in an isolated manner (no
to mention sounding like a complete idiot if this doesn't work for
others!), what I'd like folks to do if possible: retype the
hyperlink as indicated above. Please test this yourselves and
report your findings here.
Again, I hope that helps!
Rob
Check out my forum for Breeze/Presenter at:
www.robrode.com/yabb
Hope that helps. Check out his website, there's some useful
info there.