Absolute hyperlinks without losing local hyperlinks! 2nd attempt

[MattM]

Hello everyone, on the 25th May I posted the question below. No responses so
far, just wondering that's because the answer is already elsewhere in this
forum? I'd be grateful if someone could direct me to it if that's the case.
Many thanks
MattM

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
I am one of those people who is driven up the wall by Word's insistence on
turning hyperlinks into relative hyperlinks. We have Office files on a shared
network driver here and we commonly want to be able into include hyperlinks
to those files in our Word documents. We want this to work even if the Word
document containing the hyperlinks is moved or emailed from one member of the
team to another.

A suggested solution is to stop Word turning hyperlinks into relative
hyperlinks by putting an "x" or a "C:\" in the hyperlink base property (as
described in http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=903163). However, this then
breaks all the links between one part of the document to another. For
example, it is no longer possible to click on a page number in the ToC and
get to the page; it is no longer possible to use a hyperlink to a local
bookmark.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I suspect you have not received an answer because there isn't one. Word's
handling of external hyperlinks has always been unsatisfactory. If you want
them relative, it makes them absolute, and vice versa.

 

[Idaho Word Man]

Ok, now I'm puzzled. MattM says he has a problem with hyperlinks, Suzanne
(whose opinion I value highly) says there is no answer to MattM's problem,
but I don't have this kind of problem. All the documents I work on have
TOCs, most of them have absolute hyperlinks, and both sets of links work just
fine 100% of the time, both for me and for all users within our company's
intranet domain. Maybe I just don't understand the problem.

I did have a little trouble making my hyperlinks work, at first, though. I
found that I couldn't link to an internal document on a server that was
mapped as a drive on my computer. If I had our Gemini server mapped as my E
drive, nobody else could follow a link to an address that was formatted like
e:\TechWriters\document.doc unless they also had the Gemini server mapped as
their E drive. If Virgo was their E drive and Gemini was their F drive,
everything got screwed up.

But when I went to My Network Places and searched for the Gemini server, I
got an address that looked like \\Zodiac\Gemini\TechWriters\document.doc.
When I used that kind of address in my hyperlinks (instead of
e:\TechWriters\document.doc), everything worked fine for everybody.

What am I missing in this problem?

Fred

 

[MattM]

Suzanne, Fred, Many thanks for getting back to me on this one.

Fred: I think you are saying that, for you, Word *doesn't* convert absolute
hyperlinks to relative if you use a full absolute path, in the form
\\servername\volume\folder1\folder2\...\docname.doc, in the hyperlink
destination box.

That is *not* my experience - Word automatically converts even this into a
relative path.

I don't know why it does this: it's not at all helpful, and presumably it
would have been less work for the Word programmers not have implemented this
feature.

Unfortunately I don't have access to the exact version of Word/Windows I use
in my workplace right now, but I believe it's Word 2002 running on Windows
XP. I'll do yet more experimentation with this in the office tomorrow and try
and post some specific details of the behaviour of my version of Word in
various situations, in the hope this will shed a little more light here.

Thanks again, M

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

There are some settings you can check on. The problems I had were in trying
to maintain relative links in Web pages; inability to do this forced me to
upgrade to FrontPage for Web authoring, which of course was the right
decision. But have a look at these variables:

1. Hyperlink base in File | Properties. There seem to be varying opinions
about whether having one or not having one helps.

2. Tools | Options | General: Update automatic links at Open.

3. Tools | Options | General: Web Options... | Files: Update links on save.
(My problem was with "updating" links on open rather than save, however.)

 

[MattM]

Aha!

Suzanne, I think your option 3 has cracked it. Thank you!!

All the best,
MattM

PS As previously mentioned, option 1 does work (as per
http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=903163) but at the expense of breaking
links to local bookmarks: you get the error "Word cannot open the specified
file".

PPS I should add that the location of the referencing document is clearly a
factor here. If it's on your C drive, or a different server to the referenced
document, then Word clearly can't work out a relative path and will stick
with absolute - this may be why Fred doesn't have the same problem?

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Glad it worked for you.

 

[Dave]

Matt, Suzanne,

I feel your pain. We just rolled out a Policies and Procedures site with
approximately 2000 documents (many of them Word docs). They all live in one
big happy directory on a Windows Sharepoint site, so relative links are fine.
I wrote a Perl program to add the site address to the Hyperlink Base
property so that if our users should copy a document to their desktop, the
links will still work. It works perfectly... that is until today when I
realized that the hyperlink base was being prepended (is that a word) to
front of the internal document links (how dumb is that). For example a link
to a internal bookmark has the site address added to the front of it. Some
users are not having trouble though and I think they may be using an earlier
version of Word. I am using 2003 (11.8106.8107) sp2.

Have any of you found an explanation from Microsoft? I can find it in the
knowledge base.

ARRRRRGGGGHHHH!

 

[Dahz]

I just wanted to thank Suzanne because her tip #1 was the best for me.

My problem was that I had to send a file with some hyperlinks to many team
members. The hyperlinks were addressed to different files in the same folder
in our company's file server.

Every time I sent the email, the hyperlinks changed from the file server
address to a Outlook local directory one, but when I stated the hyperlink
base as the directory in the file server, the problem was gone!

Thank you so much!

dahz

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I'm glad that worked for you (and that the hyperlink base is good for
*something*).

 

[FrequentWordie]

So since all this traffic, has there been a solution to using TOC hyperlinks
when the Hyperlink Base (which I have to do for my situation) is set?

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

In what situation does this affect TOC hyperlinks? Ordinarily this is not an
issue.

 

[FrequentWordie]

We have various mirrored servers at different sites with the main server
containing the main file (using lots of include test and other hyper links)
that points to many locations. I chose to set up the base hyperlink to
position the hyperlink pointer at the most convenient place and at the point
that is mirrored using the same initial drive letter so all links would work,
which they do. The issue is that once I set it up, I lost the ability to use
either the built in TOC or /h hyperlinks to the various heading in the main
document. I think I also lost the ability to use bookmarks as the target as
well but need to check that out. I tried everything I could think of to get
the TOC working again and also many alternative ways to get the external
links to work short of setting the base hyperlink.
By the way the behaviour of the TOC click is Word opens a new file explorer
window to the hyperlink base location.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I think we're talking at cross-purposes here. The TOC generated by a TOC
field has hyperlinks to headings in the current document.

 

[FrequentWordie]

The problem is if I set the Hyperlink Base in Files | Properties, then the
Word generated hyperlinks to heading from the TOC does not work. I described
this in my last reply. Is there a workaround to this issue?

 

[Paulo]

The problem is the Excel limit of 219 caracteres.
My team had links as R:\myexcel.xls inside its MS Office 2003 documents.
Everything went well.

But when we installed the Office Service Pack 3, the Office now
automatically translate to
\\madomaine\myshare\myfolder1\myfolder2\a lot of folders\foder n\myexcel.xls

What a nigthmare. The Windows is not able to open the Excel files.

 

[Graham Mayor]

Try unchecking tools > options > general > web options > files > update
links on save.

--
<>>< ><<> ><<> <>>< ><<> <>>< <>><<>
Graham Mayor - Word MVP


<>>< ><<> ><<> <>>< ><<> <>>< <>><<>

 

[Kees]

Voila! I've spent hours repairing broken links in a long Word 2007 document
that was saved on SharePoint server. Here's where I found the selection box
that was probably causing the problem:
1. In the Word document, click the colored circle at the top left.
2. At the bottom of the drop-down menu that appears, click Word Options.
3. In the left column, click Advanced.
4. Scroll to the end of the window and click the Web Options button.
5. Click the Files tab.
6. De-select the "Update links on save" option.
7. Click OK to close the windows and go celebrate!

Now I'm wondering if there is a way to make this the default so that I don't
have to do it on every document.

 

[Kees]

It looks like the steps that I list above do make this the default for all
your Word documents, so you might need to do some repair of old files but the
links should remain as you want them in new files.