Hyperlinking to documents

[kippers]

Hi,

I want to inset a number of hyperlinks within a Word document to a set of
templates. However, I will be sending the Word document together with
templates to a 3rd party and I fear that the hyperlinks will become dead
quite easily (i.e. when the 3rd party saves the templates on to a different
drive the hyperlink will not find it). The only way I can think of getting
round this is to provide all documents on a CD and link to the E:\ drive.
However, this relies on the fact that the 3rd party won't copy the
information and store it locally- causing the same problem.

Does anyone know if there is any way of guarding against the whole issue of
ensuring hyperlinks don't easily become dead?

Any help gratefully appreciated...!

cheers,

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

This is a tricky problem.

The general approach--put the doc and all subsidiary files in the same
folder, and use relative rather than absolute hyperlinks. Circulate the
folder zipped by email to ensure each file stays in the same relation to
the other ones, or dump the entire folder onto a CD.

But read the section on FilePaths here for caveats about how Word will
deal with this--it may change your relative links.
http://word.mvps.org/faqs/tblsfldsfms/includetextfieldscontent.htm#FilePaths

It's possible that if you set the relative hyperlinks, and then Lock the
fields (select and hit cmd-F11), it will prevent Word from changing
them. Do some tests on this first--I haven't tested that route, and I
can't figure out how to tell whether a field is really Locked or not.