Going by the feedback, people found it to be something they will use, as well as finding it to be something they could navigate their way around and find what they needed.
Sadly, there were also a couple of technical glitches. It seems every time I try the CD on a new computer, there is something different that affects the way it opens. I thought I'd covered all bases by testing it on macs as well as Windows 98, XP and Vista. Files were opened in Office 2000, 2003 and 2007. Still, they behaved differently on these machines, because the default settings within these applications were also different. Some open Powerpoints as slideshows (the way I'd like them to), while others open them for editing (which I most definately didn't want them to do).
The solution, I found, was to insert images of navigation buttons ('next slide' and 'previous slide') with hyperlinks to the relevant slides, and then save the whole thing as a pdf file. OpenOffice handled the conversion brilliantly- kept the hyperlinks in place so the whole thing worked, and made it easy for me to tell it to make the pdf a certain size and to behave a certain way. (I like the way this is a setting within the file itself, rather than on the user's computer, so I knew how it would behave on all computers.) Of all the free pdf converters I tried, OpenOffice was the only one that kept the internal hyperlinks by default. Maybe Powerpoint 2007 could do this as well, but it wouldn't do it for me without a whole lot of mucking around, which I could do without.
Here's a look at (sort of) what it looks like- the navigation buttons don't function in this example, but the do give some idea of how it looks.
