Speed up adding URL hyperlinks to bullets/selected text

Question

Hi, I'm doing a presentation that requires linking a huge amount of the bullet text to different sites. I was hoping to create some sort of macro that told Keynote to add the URL of the current active window in Safari to the selected text, but Automator can't do it and I don't know of any other way to create a macro (I'm new to the Mac world).
At the moment, after go to the site I want to link to, switch to Keynote, highlight the desired text and open the Hyperlink inspector window:
1) Hyperlink inspector window defaults to Slide (vs. Webpage)
2) After I click Enable Hyperlink and choose Webpage from the pulldown menu, the URL defaults to my home page URL.
This means I have to go to Safari, highlight and copy the URL, switch back to Keynote, highlight the homepage URL, paste the correct URL (from the active Safari window), click Apple-end to get to the end of the URL and hit Enter in order to hyperlink the selected text.
I know there has to be an easier way.
At one point, I accidentally did something that dynamically changed the URL in Hyperlink inspector to the active URL on Safari, but I can't re-create it. That, at least, would be some help.
Any suggestions for how to simplify/speed up/automate this cumbersome process would be GREATLY APPRECIATED, as I am slogging along using this inefficient approach while trying to meet a looming deadline.
Thanks in advance!
Maggie
iBook G4   Mac OS X (10.4.6)  

Answer 1

Maggie, how desperate are you for a quick solution? One approach might be to edit the Keynote XML text file directly, adding the bullets and hyperlinks as elements in that file rather than through Keynote proper. This approach is relatively straightforward, and it is very fast, but it does involve getting down-and-dirty with the XML, which might not be everyone's cup of tea. It's honestly not that daunting, though, and just involved doing very minor editing to a text file within TextEdit. I don't know if it would work well for your specific needs, and it involves a completely different workflow than working in Keynote directly, but it might be worth a shot. Here's how you would add a list of hyperlinked bullets to a single slide:
- First, create a single slide with a bulleted list with a single item that has a hyperlink to a website. This will allow you to see what the XML looks like when we open the XML file. Use an unusual word or string of letters for the bullet item to make it easier to find in the XML code. Save this one slide presentation, and close it.
- In the Finder, hold down the Control key while clicking once on the presentation file. This will bring up the contextual menu. Choose "Show Package Contents". This will open a new Finder window that shows you the "guts" of the Keynote presentation, which is actually a collection of files.
- Double click on the "index.apxl.gz" file. This is the file that holds the XML markup for the presentation. It is stored in compressed form, but when you double-click it, a new file, "index.apxl", will be created. This is a plain text file, editable with TextEdit, and it is the file you will modify. Delete the "index.apxl.gz" file, as it isn't needed now, and Keynote will automagically re-compress the "index.apxl" file when we open the presentation.
- Open the "index.apxl" file in TextEdit (or whatever other text editor you like). You will see a mess of XML, without any real formatting. That's OK though, because you only need to edit a small bit of this file, and you will use the unusual word in the bullets you created as a search guide.
- Find the unusual word in the text. This word is embedded in the XML code that specifies the bullet on the slide. This is the code that you will need to edit.
The code that specifies a hyperlinked bullet will look something like this:
<sf:p sf:style="SFWPParagraphStyle-263" sf:list-level="1"><sf:link href="http://www.apple.com/"><sf:span sf:style="SFWPCharacterStyle-38">Test1</sf:span></sf:link><sf:br/></sf:p>
(The numbers of the "ParagraphStyle" and "CharacterStyle" may be different depending on the theme you used.)
If you look at this snippet, you can see that there is a URL in the <sf:link> tag -- that's the hyperlink for the bullet text. You can also see that there is some text (in this case, "Test1") wedged between the <sf:span> and </sf:span> tags -- that's the text that appears on the slide, and in your file it will be the unusual text that you searched for in the file.
Now, the cool thing is that, if you change this URL and this bullet text in the XML file and save it (having previously deleted the "index.apxl.gz" file), you will have changed the bullet text and hyperlink in the actual presentation. The much cooler thing is that you can add bullets to a slide by simply pasting multiple copies of the above code template into the XML file -- just make sure that you copy the entire bullet template (from <sf:p to </sf:p>), and that you paste it directly after another </sf:p> tag. (Be sure to use the template from your XML file, since the ParagraphStyle and CharacterStyle numbers will be different.)
What this means is that the task that formerly involved going back and forth in the Keynote interface now just involves editing a text file. In the case of your task, for example, what you could do is create a second TextEdit window, paste the bullet code template into it several times, and then just drag and drop the URLs you want into the various address spots of the templates. You can also edit the bullet text directly in the templates. Once you're done, you can simply copy the whole batch of text and paste it into the appropriate spot in the "index.apxl" XML file, and you're done.
Also, because this is now a text editing task rather than a Keynote task, you can potentially take advantage of applications that automate text editing to generate the bullet XML for you. For example, you could just create a list of the URLs, and then use the macro capabilities of Word, or (my favourite) NisusWriter, to go through the list and populate the addresses in the bullet templates. The possibilities are quite wide open with this approach.
This is just how to do one slide, but multiple slides are just as straightforward -- simply start by creating a presention where each slide has one bullet point, with unique text in each bullet. Then you can easily find the section of XML code for the bullet of each slide, and edit accordingly.
This may seem like a hugely involved and roundabout way of doing this task, but it works, and by making it a text editing task, it can make it far easier.
PowerMac G5   Mac OS X (10.4.4)