Hyperlinks in footnotes make Word crash: Need a quick fix

[BenLearning]

I've been told by our tech help that I'm going to have to individually remove
every hyperlink I've got in each footnote, throughout a book-length
manuscript. Sadly Word never stopped me putting these in, so I'd like a
better solution than one that says in essence, "Follow these simply 4,879
steps, over 561 hours, and problem solved."

First, do they all have to indeed be removed to stop Word crashing? (It
freezes whenever my cursor lands on a footnote that has a hyperlink, as far
as I can tell, trying to reproduce the problem.) If so, is there an easy way
to upload all those hyperlinks to a database like Refworks so I can easily
replace them with references that don't hold urls?

Finally, is there a service that I can pay for someone to do this for me?
It's going to be onerous!

Help!
Roben

 

[Doug Robbins - Word MVP]

Running a macro that contains the following code with convert the hyperlinks
in footnotes into ordinary text

Dim afn As Footnote
Dim i As Long
For Each afn In ActiveDocument.Footnotes
For i = afn.Range.Fields.Count To 1 Step -1
afn.Range.Fields.Unlink
Next i
Next afn

Best to run it on a copy of your document in the first instance!

If there is something else that you want done with them, let us know what it
is and we can probably come up with some code to do that as well.

--
Hope this helps.

Please reply to the newsgroup unless you wish to avail yourself of my
services on a paid consulting basis.

Doug Robbins - Word MVP, originally posted via msnews.microsoft.com

 

[BenLearning]

Thanks so much for responding. Unfortunately, the whole point was to have
links that, well, link. So making them text removes that convenience. Is
there any way to fix Word so it doesn't crash because I use the links? If
not, will they prevent crashing if all moved to endnotes at bottom of
document entirely? If so, can you give me a macro that does that, and while
at it, let me know how to run a macro?

 

[Tony Jollans]

Hyperlinks in Footnotes do not, or should not, themselves, cause Word any
problems. That said, there are many things that can go wrong, especially in
long documents, and determining what they may be can be difficult. Your best
bet - after firing your tech help - would be to better determine what the
real problem may be. Just converting footnotes to endnotes, to use your
example, is unlikely to achieve much.

Whatever you do - work on a copy of your document so that you don't do any
(more) harm to the original. If you copy a section of your document -
including some footnotes - to a new document, does that new document exhibit
the same behaviour? What if you copy the whole document content to a new
document - perhaps section by section (depending on how big or complex it
is). Alternatively, try deleting part of your document (first one half, then
the other, perhaps) - does what's left exhibit the behaviour? Is there
perhaps a damaged section of the document? If you have both available does
it make a difference if you open the document in Word 2003, or Word 2007?
Maybe you just have too many hyperlinks - the limit (for fields in total,
not just hyperlink fields) prior to Word 2007 was 32K.

These are all just suggestions - without the document to look at, I can do
little more - and I can understand it may be frustrating. Changing the way
your document works, however, will, at best, address the symptom, not the
underlying cause, and you may just find another symptom appearing somewhere
else as soon as you've done it.