Creating an Image Map in Power Point

For this activity we will use a picture of the United States that is in gif format. Right click the United States map and place it in your working folder.

Insert this picture onto a blank slide. The goal is to create hotspots (active areas) around the states you want to include in your presentation. The tool we will use in this activity is the line tool. To make this tool more accessible, I want to drag it onto my work area. To drag the line tool:

Click the AutoShapes button on the Drawing toolbar, point to Lines. With your mouse, select the blue bar highlighted with red shown below:

While holding down the left mouse key, drag the lines menu to the document. We will be using the curve line tool highlighted with red shown below:
FYI: To close the line tool, either click the X in the top right corner or simply drag it back to the drawing tool bar.

The process is quite simple. Instead of hyperlinking to the state sectors, we draw a curved line over the top. Then we hyperlink to that. To use the curve tool, simply left mouse click around the image to draw the line, then double left mouse click to join the end point with the starting point. The picture should look similar (the fill and line color might be different on yours.

Now remember, when you draw your autoshape, it does not have to be perfect. It will not be visible when you click on it, so no-one will know that it is not pixel perfect. However, you need to do a fairly good job between shapes (or states, in this example). No-one will want to click on a state and get the wrong one pop up. If you want to edit your shape you can do it easily with the Edit Points feature. To edit point, right click your shape, then select Edit Points. You can now draw the black dots surrounding your shape to get a sharper outline.

Insert a new slide into your presentation and insert the map of Florida onto the slide:

Click back on the slide that contains the United States map. We now need to create an action setting. Right click on the Florida shape you created with the line tool then select Action setting from the menu options.
As with the action buttons we covered earlier, create a link to the slide 2 which contains the map of Florida.
As you can see the fill color is blocking the view of Florida so we need to make it invisible. Refresher:
- To make your shape invisible, right click on the shape. From the menu that pops up select Format Auto Shape.
- If the Colors and Lines tab is not selected, click on that tab. In the Color block you will see the color of your shape. Click on that color block and select No Fill. In the Line section of this menu, if the Color box has anything other than No Fill selected, repeat the process. Both Fill color and Line color must be set at No Fill to make the shape invisible.
If you were actually doing this project you would continue by making each state a hotspot, then adding the state map to each slide.
Keep in mind that you must create a button on the individual state slide to return to the US map.