How do I insert a hyperlink into an e-mail?

[Spider Robinson]

How do I cause text I have typed into an e-mail to become a "hyperlink," in
Entourage? By "hyperlink," I mean what everyone else in the world calls a
"hotlink." (It took me hours just to find out that's Microsoft's new word
for it.)

That is, if I type the URL of a website, how do I cause it to change colour
and become underlined, such that a recipient of the message can just click
on that text and be taken to that website?

And if I type the the NAME of a website, how do I cause that name to
represent the site's URL, and be linked to it, so that clicking on the name
will take another to that site?

And if I type someone's e-mail address, how do I cause THAT to change colour
and become underlined, so that another may simply click on it, and be
presented with a blank e-mail already addressed to that person at that
address?

I am baffled by how baffled I am by these simple questions...after hours of
searching the Help Menu, I cannot BELIEVE that such a common everyday need
is ignored so utterly and resolutely by Microsoft. Especially since there
are several places in the Help section that specifically PROMISE they will
address my question, but are all lying. (In fact they tell how to insert
anything BUT a hyperlink. Pictures, movies, music, pleasant
smells...anything at all BUT what MOST commonly needs to be inserted into
e-mail.

In primitive old Netscape, one simply highlighted text, chose a prominent
convenient command called "LINK," and typed into the resulting dialog box
whatever URL or e-mail address one wanted that text linked to, and hit
RETURN. End of problem. How can Microsoft have failed to notice that most
of us need to perform this task a dozen times a day? How could the most
expensive and ubiquitous product on the market have such poor documentation?

I would be very grateful if anyone out there could PLEASE tell me the secret
handshake that will let me, a proud owner of expensive Microsoft Office
2004, accomplish what anyone with free Netscape Navigator 4 or Outlook
Express 2 could accomplish without even thinking about it, ten years ago.

Thanks in advance for your help.

--Spider Robinson
<www.spiderrobinson.com>
And I wish I had some way to make that a hotlink for you.

Ps--it would also be nice if, when I type "www.[whatever]," the program were
bright enough NOT to insist on capitalizing the first W. How much test
driving could they have given this program not to have noticed THAT gaping
flaw?

 

[Michel Bintener]

Hi,
sadly, you cannot do that in Entourage. Or at least not in a straightforward
manner. Since you own Office 2004, you could compose your e-mail in Word,
where you can easily create hyperlinks (select the part of the text you want
to be a hyperlink, then hit Cmd+K to enter the destination of the link. This
also works for e-mail addresses, by the way.), and then send the text to
Entourage 2004 using the File>Send To command.
Another solution would be to use Paul Berkowitz's free Make Hyperlinks X
script, which you can find on the MacScripter website,
http://scriptbuilders.net/files/makehyperlinksx2.2.1.html. Follow the
instructions that come with it; you should find this really useful, though
it is not as convenient as having the function built into Entourage itself,
I agree.

Michel

How do I cause text I have typed into an e-mail to become a "hyperlink," in
Entourage? By "hyperlink," I mean what everyone else in the world calls a
"hotlink." (It took me hours just to find out that's Microsoft's new word
for it.)

That is, if I type the URL of a website, how do I cause it to change colour
and become underlined, such that a recipient of the message can just click
on that text and be taken to that website?

And if I type the the NAME of a website, how do I cause that name to
represent the site's URL, and be linked to it, so that clicking on the name
will take another to that site?

And if I type someone's e-mail address, how do I cause THAT to change colour
and become underlined, so that another may simply click on it, and be
presented with a blank e-mail already addressed to that person at that
address?

I am baffled by how baffled I am by these simple questions...after hours of
searching the Help Menu, I cannot BELIEVE that such a common everyday need
is ignored so utterly and resolutely by Microsoft. Especially since there
are several places in the Help section that specifically PROMISE they will
address my question, but are all lying. (In fact they tell how to insert
anything BUT a hyperlink. Pictures, movies, music, pleasant
smells...anything at all BUT what MOST commonly needs to be inserted into
e-mail.

In primitive old Netscape, one simply highlighted text, chose a prominent
convenient command called "LINK," and typed into the resulting dialog box
whatever URL or e-mail address one wanted that text linked to, and hit
RETURN. End of problem. How can Microsoft have failed to notice that most
of us need to perform this task a dozen times a day? How could the most
expensive and ubiquitous product on the market have such poor documentation?

I would be very grateful if anyone out there could PLEASE tell me the secret
handshake that will let me, a proud owner of expensive Microsoft Office
2004, accomplish what anyone with free Netscape Navigator 4 or Outlook
Express 2 could accomplish without even thinking about it, ten years ago.

Thanks in advance for your help.

--Spider Robinson
<www.spiderrobinson.com>
And I wish I had some way to make that a hotlink for you.

Ps--it would also be nice if, when I type "www.[whatever]," the program were
bright enough NOT to insist on capitalizing the first W. How much test
driving could they have given this program not to have noticed THAT gaping
flaw?

 

[Ben Wright]

Yeah, Entourage does handle it in a weird way. When it's in the New Mail
Window, it doesn't look like it's a link, but when the person you're sending
it to gets it, it is a link (usually).

If you put "http://" (minus the quotes) in front of the web address (ie:
http://www.spiderrobinson.com/), it should be a hotlink/hyperlink on the
recipient's end. If you choose Mail Link to This Page in Safari
(Shift+CMD+I), it uses this format.

The email address should work if you just put it in the email, as a
precaution you can put "mailto:" in front of the email address.

Good luck, Spider.

Ben Wright
ENCOMPASS
(e-mail address removed)

PS - I'm a big fan!

How do I cause text I have typed into an e-mail to become a "hyperlink," in
Entourage? By "hyperlink," I mean what everyone else in the world calls a
"hotlink." (It took me hours just to find out that's Microsoft's new word
for it.)

That is, if I type the URL of a website, how do I cause it to change colour
and become underlined, such that a recipient of the message can just click
on that text and be taken to that website?

And if I type the the NAME of a website, how do I cause that name to
represent the site's URL, and be linked to it, so that clicking on the name
will take another to that site?

And if I type someone's e-mail address, how do I cause THAT to change colour
and become underlined, so that another may simply click on it, and be
presented with a blank e-mail already addressed to that person at that
address?

I am baffled by how baffled I am by these simple questions...after hours of
searching the Help Menu, I cannot BELIEVE that such a common everyday need
is ignored so utterly and resolutely by Microsoft. Especially since there
are several places in the Help section that specifically PROMISE they will
address my question, but are all lying. (In fact they tell how to insert
anything BUT a hyperlink. Pictures, movies, music, pleasant
smells...anything at all BUT what MOST commonly needs to be inserted into
e-mail.

In primitive old Netscape, one simply highlighted text, chose a prominent
convenient command called "LINK," and typed into the resulting dialog box
whatever URL or e-mail address one wanted that text linked to, and hit
RETURN. End of problem. How can Microsoft have failed to notice that most
of us need to perform this task a dozen times a day? How could the most
expensive and ubiquitous product on the market have such poor documentation?

I would be very grateful if anyone out there could PLEASE tell me the secret
handshake that will let me, a proud owner of expensive Microsoft Office
2004, accomplish what anyone with free Netscape Navigator 4 or Outlook
Express 2 could accomplish without even thinking about it, ten years ago.

Thanks in advance for your help.

--Spider Robinson
<www.spiderrobinson.com>
And I wish I had some way to make that a hotlink for you.

Ps--it would also be nice if, when I type "www.[whatever]," the program were
bright enough NOT to insist on capitalizing the first W. How much test
driving could they have given this program not to have noticed THAT gaping
flaw?

 

[Ben Wright]

http://www.spiderrobinson.com/

Yeah, Entourage does handle it in a weird way. When it's in the New Mail
Window, it doesn't look like it's a link, but when the person you're sending
it to gets it, it is a link (usually).

If you put "http://" (minus the quotes) in front of the web address (ie:
http://www.spiderrobinson.com/), it should be a hotlink/hyperlink on the
recipient's end. If you choose Mail Link to This Page in Safari
(Shift+CMD+I), it uses this format.

The email address should work if you just put it in the email, as a
precaution you can put "mailto:" in front of the email address.

Good luck, Spider.

Ben Wright
ENCOMPASS
(e-mail address removed)

PS - I'm a big fan!

How do I cause text I have typed into an e-mail to become a "hyperlink," in
Entourage? By "hyperlink," I mean what everyone else in the world calls a
"hotlink." (It took me hours just to find out that's Microsoft's new word
for it.)

That is, if I type the URL of a website, how do I cause it to change colour
and become underlined, such that a recipient of the message can just click
on that text and be taken to that website?

And if I type the the NAME of a website, how do I cause that name to
represent the site's URL, and be linked to it, so that clicking on the name
will take another to that site?

And if I type someone's e-mail address, how do I cause THAT to change colour
and become underlined, so that another may simply click on it, and be
presented with a blank e-mail already addressed to that person at that
address?

I am baffled by how baffled I am by these simple questions...after hours of
searching the Help Menu, I cannot BELIEVE that such a common everyday need
is ignored so utterly and resolutely by Microsoft. Especially since there
are several places in the Help section that specifically PROMISE they will
address my question, but are all lying. (In fact they tell how to insert
anything BUT a hyperlink. Pictures, movies, music, pleasant
smells...anything at all BUT what MOST commonly needs to be inserted into
e-mail.

In primitive old Netscape, one simply highlighted text, chose a prominent
convenient command called "LINK," and typed into the resulting dialog box
whatever URL or e-mail address one wanted that text linked to, and hit
RETURN. End of problem. How can Microsoft have failed to notice that most
of us need to perform this task a dozen times a day? How could the most
expensive and ubiquitous product on the market have such poor documentation?

I would be very grateful if anyone out there could PLEASE tell me the secret
handshake that will let me, a proud owner of expensive Microsoft Office
2004, accomplish what anyone with free Netscape Navigator 4 or Outlook
Express 2 could accomplish without even thinking about it, ten years ago.

Thanks in advance for your help.

--Spider Robinson
<www.spiderrobinson.com>
And I wish I had some way to make that a hotlink for you.

Ps--it would also be nice if, when I type "www.[whatever]," the program were
bright enough NOT to insist on capitalizing the first W. How much test
driving could they have given this program not to have noticed THAT gaping
flaw?

 

[Allen Watson]

PS - I'm a big fan!

Me, too!

And by the way, if you happen to be inserting a really long URL that
goes more than one line, enclose it in angle brackets, for instance
this link to Spider Robinson books on Amazon:

<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/s...hor-exact=Spider Robinson/002-0206045-7349655>

This

allows the receiving program (most of them, anyhow) to ignore the link break.

 

[mmmmark]

Me, too!

And by the way, if you happen to be inserting a really long URL that goes
more than one line, enclose it in angle brackets, for instance this link
to Spider Robinson books on Amazon:

<http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/s...hor-exact=Spider Robinson/002-0206045-7349655>

This
allows the receiving program (most of them, anyhow) to ignore the link
break.


--
Allen Watson
MVP for Office (Entourage, Word)
http://homepage.mac.com/allen_a_watson/
HELP for Entourage: http://entourage.mvps.org

Or you can always use tiny url or baby url to create a shorter link such as:

http://tinyurl.com/73rne OR

http://babyurl.com/amazon

nevermind that these can be security risks. ;-)

 

[mmmmark]

Or you can always use tiny url or baby url to create a shorter link such
as:

http://tinyurl.com/73rne OR

http://babyurl.com/amazon

nevermind that these can be security risks. ;-)

Oops, the last one should be http://babyurl.com/AmGxTa

 

[Nathan Herring [MSFT]]

The angle brackets also help when it's not otherwise clear to Entourage when
the url ends.

e.g., Ben Wright's (ie: http://www.spiderrobinson.com/)

(Note the trailing paren is treated as part of the URL.)

vs

(ie: <http://www.spiderrobinson.com/>)

-nh

 

[Mickey Stevens]

The angle brackets also help when it's not otherwise clear to Entourage when
the url ends.

e.g., Ben Wright's (ie: http://www.spiderrobinson.com/)

(Note the trailing paren is treated as part of the URL.)

That doesn't seem to be the case here (Entourage 2004 11.1.0), but I know
what you mean. I have seen this issue with URLs enclosed in parentheses in
Entourage & other mail clients.

 

[Spider Robinson]

Oh, I LOVE it!

Ben and Allen, bless your hearts, and two other vital organs of your choice
apiece. I KNEW there would turn out to be a perfectly simple way to do it.

And sure enough, just as I should have guessed, it is about the stupidest
way possible. Just as every other bit of internet-related software around
has finally become bright enough to DISPENSE with typing http://--and in
some few cases of runaway user-kindliness, with typing even the www.
--Microsoft decides to REQUIRE it, every time. How did I not see that
coming? I hear the ghost of my friend Jef Raskin chuckling at my naivete.

As a truly humorous refinement, they won't even TELL you that in the
documentation...

....AND at the same time, they set things up so that EVEN IF YOU WERE TO
ACCIDENTALLY STUMBLE ACROSS THEIR HYPERLINK SYSTEM--say, by experimentally
trying the dumbest possible way to effect it, on a hunch--YOU GET NO VISUAL
CUE TO LET YOU KNOW WHETHER YOU JUST SUCCEEDED OR NOT. The hyperlink text
DOES NOT turn blue or underlined once the sytem recognizes it as
such...which I do believe would have been technologically possible for an
outfit like Microsoft.

But hey, how could Microsoft have guessed that anyone using their e-mail
program might ever also want to, I don't know, advertise, or effect
communication, or something?

Note the final punchline: Microsoft DOES HAVE a perfectly simple,
convenient, well documented interface procedure for inserting hyperlinks or
live addresses into text.

They keep it over in Word, to prevent its use.

Again, thanks for tickling my funnybone AND solving my problem, Ben and
Allen and all others who responded.

If anyone would like to see what GOOD software looks like, and by that I
mean HUMANE software, and by that I mean "software as if the convenience of
the user mattered," I urge you to go to www.jefraskin.com and take a look at
the last posthumous gift of the greatest interface designer of the 20th
century, Jef Raskin, creator of the Graphical Interface, the Macintosh,
drag-and-drop editing, etc. It is his long-rumoured humane operating
system, ARCHIE. I have not yet tried it, and will not until I deliver my
current novel to the publisher...but those who have tried it say that it is
as astonishing and awesome a conceptual breakthrough as the Graphical User
Interface itself was, in its time. (Jef invented THAT one, too.) Jef had
it nearly done at the time of his tragic premature death earlier this year,
and his son Aza and a friend have completed it for him....and The Rest Of
Us. Check it out. They say it will run on just about ANY computer. Sight
unseen, I guarantee it won't have any bungles as large as forgetting to
provide for convenient hyperlinks in the e-mail front end....


--Spider,
Author of VERY BAD DEATHS
http://www.spiderrobinson.com

(Did that work?)

http://www.spiderrobinson.com/

Yeah, Entourage does handle it in a weird way. When it's in the New Mail
Window, it doesn't look like it's a link, but when the person you're sending
it to gets it, it is a link (usually).

If you put "http://" (minus the quotes) in front of the web address (ie:
http://www.spiderrobinson.com/), it should be a hotlink/hyperlink on the
recipient's end. If you choose Mail Link to This Page in Safari
(Shift+CMD+I), it uses this format.

The email address should work if you just put it in the email, as a
precaution you can put "mailto:" in front of the email address.

Good luck, Spider.

Ben Wright
ENCOMPASS
(e-mail address removed)

PS - I'm a big fan!

How do I cause text I have typed into an e-mail to become a "hyperlink," in
Entourage? By "hyperlink," I mean what everyone else in the world calls a
"hotlink." (It took me hours just to find out that's Microsoft's new word
for it.)

That is, if I type the URL of a website, how do I cause it to change colour
and become underlined, such that a recipient of the message can just click
on that text and be taken to that website?

And if I type the the NAME of a website, how do I cause that name to
represent the site's URL, and be linked to it, so that clicking on the name
will take another to that site?

And if I type someone's e-mail address, how do I cause THAT to change colour
and become underlined, so that another may simply click on it, and be
presented with a blank e-mail already addressed to that person at that
address?

I am baffled by how baffled I am by these simple questions...after hours of
searching the Help Menu, I cannot BELIEVE that such a common everyday need
is ignored so utterly and resolutely by Microsoft. Especially since there
are several places in the Help section that specifically PROMISE they will
address my question, but are all lying. (In fact they tell how to insert
anything BUT a hyperlink. Pictures, movies, music, pleasant
smells...anything at all BUT what MOST commonly needs to be inserted into
e-mail.

In primitive old Netscape, one simply highlighted text, chose a prominent
convenient command called "LINK," and typed into the resulting dialog box
whatever URL or e-mail address one wanted that text linked to, and hit
RETURN. End of problem. How can Microsoft have failed to notice that most
of us need to perform this task a dozen times a day? How could the most
expensive and ubiquitous product on the market have such poor documentation?

I would be very grateful if anyone out there could PLEASE tell me the secret
handshake that will let me, a proud owner of expensive Microsoft Office
2004, accomplish what anyone with free Netscape Navigator 4 or Outlook
Express 2 could accomplish without even thinking about it, ten years ago.

Thanks in advance for your help.

--Spider Robinson
<www.spiderrobinson.com>
And I wish I had some way to make that a hotlink for you.

Ps--it would also be nice if, when I type "www.[whatever]," the program were
bright enough NOT to insist on capitalizing the first W. How much test
driving could they have given this program not to have noticed THAT gaping
flaw?

 

[Michel Bintener]

[Š] I urge you to go to www.jefraskin.com and take a look at the last
posthumous gift of the greatest interface designer of the 20th century, Jef
Raskin, creator of the Graphical Interface, the Macintosh, drag-and-drop
editing, etc.

For purposes of illustration, you did not insert the "http://" bit into the
URL you just posted, so Entourage doesn't recognise it as a hyperlink.
However, there's yet another workaround: if you click on "incomplete" URLs,
i.e. URLs without the "http://" bit, while holding down the Cmd key, you're
telling Entourage that the selected text IS a hyperlink, and it will open
the URL in your browser. Try it on the link in the quoted text above, and
you'll see. I'm not sure if that one is documented, either, but there you
go.

http://www.spiderrobinson.com

(Did that work?)

Yes, it did.

 

[Spider Robinson]

Dear Michael,

Now THAT one is truly bizarre!

You're right, it works a treat. But what a screwball implementation!

Has anybody else noticed ANOTHER inexplicably stupid feature of Entourage?
If you want to Switch Identities....something I can see coming up dozens of
times in an average user's day, as it does in mine....you must first seek
out and Quit any other components of the Office 2004 package that might
happen to be open at the time. You can't Switch Identities while Word,
Excel, PowerPoint or Messenger are open.

Why? No imaginable circumstances come to mind in which this would be
acceptable, let alone useful, much less desirable. You just can't, that's
all.

Has NOBODY at Microsoft read Jef Raskin's HUMANE INTERFACE? Don't they have
ANY beta testers down there?

Hey, they have the market by the throat. Why bother being good? Why bother
even being tolerable?

 

[Nathan Herring [MSFT]]

Has anybody else noticed ANOTHER inexplicably stupid feature of Entourage?
If you want to Switch Identities....something I can see coming up dozens of
times in an average user's day, as it does in mine....you must first seek
out and Quit any other components of the Office 2004 package that might
happen to be open at the time. You can't Switch Identities while Word,
Excel, PowerPoint or Messenger are open.

Why do you "see [the issue of switching identities] coming up dozens of
times in an average user's day"? Why do you switch identities dozens of
times a day?

The identity was designed to represent you and all the accounts that you
would need to do your work. Under what circumstances are you stuck not being
able to have all that you need in one identity? Are you running up against
the database size limit, or is there some other shortcoming that you are
trying to address? Or is it merely personal preference?

Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Messenger are written expressly to communicate
and work with Entourage and the identity in Entourage. The current design
has the limitation that they need to relinquish the use of the current
identity before switching to a new one, which is effected by quitting the
application.

-nh

 

[Nathan Herring [MSFT]]

And sure enough, just as I should have guessed, it is about the stupidest
way possible. Just as every other bit of internet-related software around
has finally become bright enough to DISPENSE with typing http://--and in
some few cases of runaway user-kindliness, with typing even the www.
--Microsoft decides to REQUIRE it, every time. How did I not see that
coming? I hear the ghost of my friend Jef Raskin chuckling at my naivete.

I think Outlook Express for the Mac, which is the father of Entourage,
predates most of the auto-sensing internet-related software around that you
mention. It's not as if we had added the feature to sense that and then
arbitrarily said, "No, no, that's too easy, we'll REQUIRE you to add the URI
prefix." We simply have not added extra autosensing code to that feature.

As a truly humorous refinement, they won't even TELL you that in the
documentation...

Yup, the documentation for hyperlink is missing that information.

...AND at the same time, they set things up so that EVEN IF YOU WERE TO
ACCIDENTALLY STUMBLE ACROSS THEIR HYPERLINK SYSTEM--say, by experimentally
trying the dumbest possible way to effect it, on a hunch--YOU GET NO VISUAL
CUE TO LET YOU KNOW WHETHER YOU JUST SUCCEEDED OR NOT. The hyperlink text
DOES NOT turn blue or underlined once the sytem recognizes it as
such...which I do believe would have been technologically possible for an
outfit like Microsoft.

Sounds like a good feature request.

But hey, how could Microsoft have guessed that anyone using their e-mail
program might ever also want to, I don't know, advertise, or effect
communication, or something?

Note the final punchline: Microsoft DOES HAVE a perfectly simple,
convenient, well documented interface procedure for inserting hyperlinks or
live addresses into text.

They keep it over in Word, to prevent its use.

You are more than welcome to use Word to send e-mail messages. In Word, go
to File/Send To/Mail Recipient (as HTML). Exactly how is this preventing its
use?

-nh