(A Quick Tip from Roger Wagner) While working on a very big stack in HyperStudio 5®, Lots Of Lemurs, I encountered a difficulty when trying to link to specific cards. The dialog window for the action Another card…. is a small square. A scrollbar lets you move between cards.

However, only two cards at a time fit in the window. With over thirty cards in my stack, it was almost impossible to position the scrollbar precisely on the card I wanted. It kept landing between cards.

I asked Roger Wagner if there were any plans to make that dialog window larger. Always thinking outside the box, Roger said he never had problems with that little window because he knew of a better way to link cards. So here is Roger’s magic trick for quickly setting links to another card.

Note: This trick is so easy you can do it by reading this post one time, but I’ve made a PDF to download in case you might want to use it as a handout. There’s also an online version of the PDF if you want to present to a group. Both links are at the base of this page.

Experimenting With A Test Stack

The basic strategy is to drag and drop the thumbnail of a card onto the object you want to link to that card. This sounded too easy to be real, so I made a test stack to see how this would work.

In my test stack, I created three cards with full-page backgrounds. These were a photo of the earth in space, a Mayan city scene, and a beach. On the first card in the test stack, I made three typical HyperStudio objects: a text box, a button, and a graphic object.

The idea was to drag and drop thumbnails of the cards. The easiest way to have these close by is to make sure the Card Index is visible. You can show the Card Index by clicking a button on the far left of the bottom toolbar, or from the View menu. You also can set the Card Index to be open by default under Preferences.

Drag And Drop Card Links

First, I decided to set the text box so that clicking it would go to the card with the Earth background. I made sure I was on the first card, the one with the three objects. Then I clicked down on the thumbnail image of the Earth card in the Card Index, dragged it over onto the card and on top of the text box, and dropped it. Did it make a link? We’ll test that later.

For my second test, I clicked down on the last card, the Beach, and dragged that thumbnail over on top of the button. I noticed that once I had the thumbnail actually over part of the button, I got a curved arrow cursor. That lets me know it’s setting up an action.

For the final test, I clicked and dragged the Mayan city card thumbnail from the Card Index to the graphic object, which is a red airplane. I wondered exactly what was happening when I dropped those thumbnails! So I used the Inspector to see what settings were in the graphic object.

Looking at Actions with the Inspector, I could see that the destination Another card… was chosen. When I opened it, the dialog told me that this graphic object really was set to go to the Mayan card. Super! I also noticed that setting links in this way does not choose any transition effect. From this point in the Inspector, I could easily add a transition without struggling to set the link.

I could also see that actions had been set on all three items by looking at the card. Each object now had a green ball with a checkmark, showing that some action had been set. And when I clicked each object, it took me to the card I had linked. Victory!

Linking buttons or other objects to another card is probably the most common HyperStudio task. Having this neat trick to speed up the process will certainly speed up building any stack.

Thanks, Roger!

Application needed: HyperStudio 5, Acrobat Reader.
Subject area: Teacher Tip.
Level: Author.

Download-Tip

DragAndDropCardLinks.pdf (1.6 MB) Drag And Drop Card Links HyperStudio 5 Tip to print. Acrobat Reader.

Drag And Drop Card Links Online (1.6 MB) Drag And Drop Card Links HyperStudio 5 Tip online, ready to present to a group.