Microsoft Word 2000 Tips – How To Add Web Hyperlinks to a Document

Let’s pretend for a few minutes. You’re in Microsoft Word, creating a document for a new product that your company is manufacturing. The document will end up on your company’s Web site for public viewing. You need your customers who do not have Adobe Acrobat Reader installed on their computers to go to Adobe’s Web site and download the product. So you open your Web browser, go to the location you want, highlight the URL in the address box, right-click on it, click on Copy, go back to your Word document, click in the document where you want the Web site address to go, right-click again, click on Paste, and there’s the link included in your document. But you realize it looks a little bit confusing.

Go to http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/ detail.jsp?ftpID=3312 for more information.

You know the link will work, because the text has changed color and is underlined. Still, all that gobbledygook doesn’t really tell the reader much about where she’ll end up when she clicks on the link, so you decide to clarify a little.

Go to Adobe’s Web site (http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/ detail.jsp?ftpID=3312) for more information.

Now the reader knows where the link goes, but it sure does mess up the nice format of your article. Wouldn’t it be nice to get rid of the confusing link information and have the reader click on “normal" text in the line to get to the link?

Go to Adobe’s Web site for more information.

Well, guess what? Microsoft Word lets you do just that, by letting you assign a hyperlink to text.

What’s a Hyperlink?

A hyperlink is simply a place in a document that, when clicked on, takes you to another location. In this example, the location is on a Web site. (You can also create hyperlinks to other files, or to other places within the same document, but that’s a topic for a later date.) It makes it easier for the reader to go from place to place within your document, or from one document to another, while remaining in Word.

The underlined texts in the three examples above are hyperlinks. They all point to a Web site. When the reader clicks on the underlined text, she’ll be taken to that Web site. When she’s done viewing the site, she can click on the Back arrow in the menu bar (because the reader is going to a Web site, the menu bar in Word changes to the menu bar in her Web browser). Doing so will take her back to Word, to the place in the document where she was before she clicked on the hyperlink.

What’s the Process?

It’s terribly easy to do this. Here’s how:

1. With your Word document up and running, open your Web browser and go to the location you want to include in your document.
2. Go back to the Word document and highlight the text you want to use as your hyperlink.
3. In the Menu Bar, click on Insert, Hyperlink (or click on the icon in the menu bar that looks like a globe with a piece of chain link in front of it).
4. In the “Link To" column on the left, make sure the first option (Existing File or Web Page) is selected. Verify the “Or select from list" column to the right of that has the last option (Inserted Links) selected. (These are both defaults, by the way.) The box for “Type the file or Web page name" should be blank.
5. Click on the window for your Web browser.
6. Click on the window for your Word document. The box for “Type the file or Web page name" now contains the URL that is on display in your Web browser window.
7. Click OK. And you’re done!

You’ll notice in the Hyperlink window there’s a dropdown box displaying the URLs of other Web locations. It’s the same list you get when you click on the down arrow on the right side of the URL box in your Web browser. So if you’ve been to the site you want to link to, and it shows up in the dropdown box, you can select it from there as well.

What’s the Reason?

“Well, big whoop," you may be thinking. “It’s just as easy to copy the link like in the first example. Besides, when I print the document out, if I don’t have the link displayed, the reader won’t know what URL to type into the address box in her browser so she can get to the Web site!"

This is true. If you print a Word document with hyperlinks in it, all you’ll see is the text. However, if Word is the editor you use when writing email (which is a choice you have if your Outlook is set up to use HTML), the links will appear in your email exactly as you’ve typed them in the Word document. Ditto if you use a program to convert Word documents to Adobe Acrobat format (.pdf files), or if you use Word to design your Web pages. In these cases, creating the hyperlink is going to look (and work) a lot nicer.

And There’s More…

You can use hyperlinks to do more than just go to a Web site. You can use them (along with bookmarks) to quickly go from place to place within a large document, to open up other files, and to go to specific pages or locations within Web sites. Those, too, are conversations for another time. But you get the idea. Hyperlinks are a major tool to use when navigating the Internet. Take the time to try using them and you’ll wonder how you ever got along without them!