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.
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