You may come across a problem with the way Word treats links by default in your document. Word allows you to have text that actively links to an online source, but how you want Word to treat that text is entirely up to you. Follow these articles to learn useful tips such as how to control URL formatting or convert links to behave as desired.

Tips, Tricks, and Answers

The following articles are available for the 'Hyperlinks' topic. Click the article''s title (shown in bold) to see the associated article.

   Adding Hyperlinks
Adding a hyperlink to a text selection is easy to do in Word. All you need to do is make a couple of clicks and specify the target for the link.

   Associating a Name with a Position
Wouldn't it be great if Word allowed you to have a small pop-up that showed you some information associated with a special phrase in your document? You can accomplish this by using one of the hyperlink features in the program.

   Changing from Absolute to Relative Hyperlinks
It is easy to amass a large number of hyperlinks in a document. You may want to process these hyperlinks in some way, perhaps to change the address to which they refer. Here's a handy macro that does just that.

   Changing How Links are Activated
Got some active links in your document? Do you want to have them activated when you click on them, or do you want to require another step and have them activated when you hold down the Ctrl key and click on them? The choice in behavior is up to you; here's how to change it.

   Checking for Valid Hyperlinks
If you have a document containing a lot of hyperlinks, it would be cool if there was a way to check all those hyperlinks and make sure they weren't broken. Word doesn't provide such a feature, but there are ways you can help to accomplish the task.

   Clearing Lists in the Insert Hyperlink Dialog Box
Word maintains a series of URLs and file references in the Insert Hyperlink dialog box. How to clear these lists is a mystery to anyone except the folks at Microsoft.

   Closing Documents after a Hyperlink
When you click a hyperlink that takes you to another document, Word dutifully opens the new document in its own window. What if you want the old document (the one containing the hyperlink) to be closed? You may be out of luck, as explained in this tip.

   Controlling URL Formatting
When you type a URL into a document, Word helpfully converts it to a live hyperlink. If you don't want Word to be quite that helpful, here's how to turn off (or on) the conversion of those URLs.

   Counting Internal Links
Word allows you to easily add hyperlinks to your documents. These links can be to either a bookmark within your document or to a location in an external resource. Here's how you can figure out whether those links are referencing internal or external information.

   Creating a Hyperlink to a Specific Page
Most people add hyperlinks in a document to reference pages on the Web. You can, however, create hyperlinks to other Word documents. If you want to create a hyperlink to a particular page in another document, you'll need to use this workaround.

   Creating Hyperlinks from E-mail Addresses
Got a document that has a whole raft of e-mail address in it? You can easily convert all of them to clickable hyperlinks by using the AutoFormat capabilities of Word.

   Differences in Behavior of Links
Got some active links in your document? Do you want to have them activated when you click on them, or do you want to require another step and have them activated when you hold down the Ctrl key and click on them? The choice in behavior is up to you; here's how to change it.

   Editing a Hyperlink
Word allows you to embed active hyperlinks in your documents. If you later want to change or edit that hyperlink, you can use the techniques discussed in this tip.

   Embedding Linked Documents
Word allows you to link one document to another document rather easily. If you later want to grab the contents of a linked document and put those contents in the current document, how you do it depends on how the linking was done in the first place.

   Getting Rid of Hyperlinks in Footnotes
When you add hyperlinks to a document, Word makes them active, meaning you can click them to open the target of the hyperlink. If you want to get rid of the hyperlinks that may appear in footnotes, this tip is for you.

   Getting Rid of Many Hyperlinks
Need to get rid of hyperlinks that result when you paste information from the Internet into your document? Here's some ways you can go about getting rid of them.

   Getting Rid of the Ctrl+Click Message
When you add a hyperlink to a document, you can later click that link to display whatever is linked to. Well, you actually have to Ctrl+Click to follow the link and a message is displayed to that effect whenever you put the mouse pointer over the link. This tip talks a bit about that message and how you can modify what it says.

   Hyperlink Formatting
Word, as you type, normally formats hyperlinks automatically. If you don't like the way that hyperlinks look in a particular document, you can make a simple change to the style used for hyperlinks and the change will be made throughout your document.

   Hyperlinks from Headings to the TOC
A table of contents is a great way to help organize lengthy documents. In a default TOC, you can use each entry as a hyperlink to the headings in the document. Getting back to the TOC, though, can take a bit of work.

   Hyperlinks Not Found
When creating hyperlinks in a document, it is important to remember the difference between absolute and relative referencing. If you use the latter, you could end up with hyperlinks that are broken if the target of those links becomes unavailable for some reason.

   Making Live URLs Into Normal Text
Convert those URLs into regular text! It's easy to do when you follow the steps in this tip.

   Non-Printing Hyperlinks
Karen is having problems getting hyperlinks to print in a document on her home computer. There are only a limited number of reasons why this would be a problem, as described in this tip.

   Pasting a Hyperlink
When you paste information into a document, you can specify that it be inserted as a hyperlink rather than as normal text. Doing so allows you to establish a link between the text and the original source of that text.

   Pop-up Windows in Word
Want to add a small pop-up window over a word in your document? There is no way to do this directly in Word, but you can use the Web features of the program to simulate such a feature.

   Pulling All Hyperlinks
Word allows you to add hyperlinks to your document. If your document includes quite a few hyperlinks, you may want a way to list, in a document, all those hyperlinks. Here's a quick and easy way to do it.

   Replacing Plain Text with a Hyperlink
Active hyperlinks can be a desired feature in some types of documents. If you want to replace multiple instances of plain text with an active hyperlink, you'll welcome the techniques discussed in this tip.

   Returning to the Source of a Cross-Reference
If you add cross-references to your document, you may want a way for the reader to follow the reference and then return to the original location of the cross-reference. This tip provides three distinct ways that you can accomplish this task.

   Turning E-mail Addresses into Hyperlinks
Got a whole bunch of e-mail addresses that you need to convert to active hyperlinks? You can do the conversion in a single step by using Word's AutoFormat capabilities.

   Updating Document Links
If you establish dynamic links between documents, then you can force Word to update those links whenever you want. How you do the update depends on the version of Word you are using, as described in this tip.

   Weird Hyperlink Behavior
When you insert a hyperlink, you expect it to look like, well, a hyperlink. But what if it really looks like some strange coding that you don't recognize? This tip explains what the problem may be and how you can quickly get back to the hyperlinks you expect.

   Word Link to Create a New Excel Workbook
It's easy to create and include links in your documents to other sources, in and out of Word. There are some limitations you should keep in mind when using these links. This tips explains what they are (at least when it comes to Word and Excel) and how to avoid potential problems.