Hyperlink hijinks in Office - Reviews - Software - Productivity

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This story was printed from ZDNet Australia.
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Hyperlink hijinks in Office

August 31, 2001
URL: http://www.zdnet.com.au/reviews/software/productivity/soa/Hyperlink-hijinks-in-Office/0,139023447,120237342,00.htm

The trouble with hyperlinks
It seems like a simple enough idea to let you put Web-like hyperlinks into your Office documents. Simple, we wish... We've seen more panicked messages about hyperlinks as time goes by.

The basics are fairly simple for anyone who has surfed the Web. You click on some text and the Web page changes to the site mentioned in the link that's associated with or "underneath" that text. You can do the same in Office documents except the links don't have to be to just Web pages. They can be other documents, spreadsheets, or files too!

But like much to do with Microsoft Office, it's taken some time for the makers to get their act together. Office XP takes some steps forward and (alas) backward in that regard.

To make a hyperlink is consistent across all the Office programs, you highlight the text you want to change into a link and press Ctrl+K. The hyperlink dialog box opens and you can enter the link. There are various frills on this dialog box depending on which version of Office you have (drop-down lists of previously used links, and so on). But for regular links, it's easiest to find the page you want in your browser, then copy the link complete from the browser address bar to the hyperlink box in your Office program.

Hyperlink horrors
Now that you have a link in your document you can edit it at any time simply by right-clicking on it and choosing Edit Hyperlink.

This is where you may find an Office bug that was curiously not fixed in Office XP. Try creating a link (any link) under the word "Quidditch" and once you've made the link, right-click on it. (I'm assuming here that Quidditch is marked with a red underline as a spelling error, as it should be for all misspelled words). Have you noticed that the Hyperlink options don't appear? The bug is that the RH menu won't show the link options for a supposedly misspelled word--and that happens fairly often with hyperlinks.

Lots of Office users have written us thinking that the link is now unreachable. As usual, there's a workaround for the bug. Just highlight the link and press Ctrl+K and that will open the hyperlink dialog box. For a more lasting fix, right-click on the link and choose Ignore All or Add to Dictionary to make the red underline go away.

In Office 2000 the annoying thing about links was that a single accidental click on one would cause Office to seize up while it goes off to open that page. Unfortunately, there's nothing you can do about this annoyance. In the new Office you can follow a hyperlink by holding the Control key down while clicking.

Then in Office XP, Microsoft has added a new bug. If you type in some hyperlinks, Office tries to "fix" them to correct errors. The problem is that not all the changes it makes are necessary. For example, you can have double slashes (//) in links despite what Microsoft thinks. You get no warning of any link changes that are made, so you have to beware.

You can't edit the arbitrarily changed hyperlink since it'll be fixed as soon as you click OK on the hyperlinks dialog box. The workaround is to press Alt+F9, this will reveal the field code that makes the hyperlink (look for the curly brackets, you can change the link in the field). In FrontPage you can switch to HTML view and change the link there (look for the href tag).

Automatic hyperlinks trap
You're typing away and enter a Web link like http://www.woodyswatch.com and lo it turns into a hyperlink. Not magic, just a simple extension of the AutoCorrect feature that fixes up your common spelling mistakes. Office "sees" the http:// at the start and knows to convert it and what follows into a link. The text and the underlying link are exactly the same.

But there lies the trap in these automatic links. You have to remember that if you change the visible link text, it does NOT change the underlying link. You have to change the link separately.

This happens more often than you'd think. You type a link but realize later that you spelled it wrong. Going back and changing the link you can see won't change the underlying link. You have to do that separately.