Add links to Microsoft Word documents

Put clickable links in your documents to make them easier for others to use

Hyperlinks are the driving force behind the internet.

Every time you click on a highlighted word, button or menu to be taken to another page, it’s an underlying
hyperlink that takes you where you want to go.

But this type of link is not the preserve of web designers and programmers; anybody can use them to make
their Microsoft Word documents excitingly interactive.

Hyperlinks work only when documents are loaded into Word and browsed on screen, so they’re at their most
useful when documents are shared on a network or sent as email attachments, but navigable Word files may
also be printed in the usual way.

They make it easy for readers to find their way around lengthy documents, and they’re ideal for reports and
guides that need to call on figures or pictures stored in other documents.

Hyperlinks have been included in every version of Microsoft Word from 1997 onwards, so unless you’re
working on a vintage computer, you should be able to use them. There are minor differences in the way
hyperlinks are handled by Word 2003 and 2007, but we’ll describe these later. To see how hyperlinks work,
start with a blank document in Word and type ‘Hold down Ctrl and click here to see the latest figures’. Then
double-click the word ‘here’ to select it, as in our screenshot.

The aim is to link the word ‘here’ to a separate document containing the figures. It could be a spreadsheet,
another Word document or even a table of figures captured by a scanner and saved on disk. We’ve used an
Excel spreadsheet file called Deliveries.xls, but for the purpose of testing, feel free to use any Word file that
exists on your hard disk. To insert the link, right-click on the highlighted word ‘here’ to show a menu, then click
the Hyperlink entry.
The Insert Hyperlink dialogue box is displayed. Although several options can be set from here, they’re all
optional apart from supplying an address in the Address panel. When linking to a website, the address is a
location on the web (for example, www.computeractive.co.uk), but when linking to another document, the
address is the location and name of the file to be linked. The easiest way of entering a file name correctly is to
browse for it within the dialogue box and then click OK, which ensures the wrong name isn’t typed in error.

When the dialogue box closes, the link is ready to be tested. Hold down the Ctrl key and click on the word
‘here’, which is coloured blue and underlined to show that it is a hyperlink. If you are using a version of Word
prior to Word 2003, the linked file will be immediately loaded and displayed. Things are slightly more
complicated if using Word 2003 or 2007, because both these versions first insist that the user clicks Yes to
confirm that the link is safe to use.
The linked document is displayed in its own full-screen window. If desired, the linked document can be resized
so that it can be viewed at the same time as the Microsoft Word master document. To return to reading or
editing the master document, simply close the linked document in the usual way by clicking its File menu and
selecting Exit, or by clicking the ‘X’ in the top right-hand corner of its window.
If you know the document will be read using the same PC that was used to produce it, there’s a simple tweak to
be employed so that Microsoft Word removes the need to press Ctrl when clicking a link. Most users prefer
clicking without Ctrl because it’s just like using the web. Open the Tools menu and click Options, then select the
Edit tab. On the Edit tab, click to remove the tick from ‘Use CTRL + Click to follow hyperlink’, then click OK.

Having removed the necessity to hold down Ctrl when clicking a hyperlink, you’ll also need to modify the
descriptive text accompanying the link, as shown here. There’s a slight downside to the single-click technique,
as it becomes very difficult to select or edit a hyperlink without accidentally activating the link. Fortunately,
there’s a way around this problem by right-clicking a hyperlink and choosing Edit Hyperlink or Select Hyperlink
when you wish to make changes to it.
One way of using hyperlinks is to create a Word document that acts as a menu. When a menu option is clicked,
a hyperlink opens the relevant document from disk. In this way, provided the supporting documents are always
saved with the same name and in the same folders, it is possible to keep a master document up to date simply
by changing the individual files to which it is linked.

As mentioned earlier, a second use for hyperlinks is to make information on the web accessible from within
Word documents. Instead of pointing to local files on local hard disks, these hyperlinks point to internet
locations. The procedure for inserting a web hyperlink is identical to that of inserting a file hyperlink, as
described in Steps 1 to 3, but instead of browsing for a file on a hard disk, the URL of the desired web page is
typed into the Address panel of the Insert Hyperlink dialogue box.

If the URL is complicated, it’s easier to copy it from the Address or Location bar of the web browser and paste it
into position in the Address panel of the Insert Hyperlink dialogue box. To do this, visit the desired web page
and click on the address at the top to select it. Hold down Ctrl and press C to copy the address, and then in the
Address panel of the Insert Hyperlink dialogue box hold down Ctrl and press V to paste the address into place.
Click OK to complete the link.

Hyperlinks may also be used to jump from one position in a long document to a different one in the same
document. In this way, they work rather like the menu illustrated in Step 8, but when a user clicks on a link,
they’re taken not to a separate document but a different position in the same document. To set up such a link,
you must define the point you want to jump to, then create a bookmark at that point. To do so, place the text-
entry cursor at the desired point, open the Insert menu, then click Bookmark.
In the Bookmark dialogue box, type a descriptive name for the bookmark (we used ‘WhyBuy’), then click the
Add button. Go back to where you want to place the hyperlink and select a word, a piece of clip art or a
photograph — they can all be used as triggers for hyperlinks. Having selected a trigger, right-click on the
selection, then click Hyperlink, In the ‘Link to’ section of the Insert Hyperlink dialogue box, click ‘Place in this
document’.

If a document has been composed using headings and styles, each of these is listed in the Insert Hyperlink
dialogue box as a possible destination for the hyperlink. Bookmarks are listed after the headings and styles, so
you may need to use the scroll bar to view them. Select the one to be jumped to (in this case, ‘WhyBuy’) and
click OK. It’s a good idea when using hyperlinks in this way to define a bookmark and scatter frequent ‘Return
to menu’ hyperlinks throughout the document.
Those with earlier versions of Word who have reached this far should now know enough about hyperlinks to
experiment for themselves. Users of Word 2003 and 2007 might like to make changes to suppress the warning
message about unsafe hyperlinks, which is shown in Step 4. Microsoft provides detailed instructions on how
this can be achieved on its support pages. For Word 2003, visit www.snipurl.com/2euih and for Word 2007, visit
www.snipurl.com/2euim. Both solutions involve editing the Windows Registry, so we don’t recommend using
them unless you have worked with it before.