Hi Joel,
See! I am not the only person who uses the web toolbar.
For those who don't know about this feature, use Word's View menu to toggle
this toolbar on and off. View > Toolbars > Web
A long time ago (Word 5 or 6) Microsoft cooked up a Word add-in that was the
precursor to the existing web toolbar. It did what you are seeking - it made
Word work like a really clunky web browser and you could go from web page to
web page using the navigation on the toolbar.
But it was never a feature that was robust enough to handle most web pages.
The intent was to let people "round trip" meaning that you could use Word to
save a document as a web page, use FTP to put it onto a web server. Then
anyone with Word could load that web page into Word using the web toolbar
and Word would have a perfect reproduction of the document without ever
having to save in Word's proprietary .doc format.
Somewhere along the way someone decided that because Word makes a crappy web
browser that when someone tries to navigate by clicking a link that Word
should not try to open the link. Rather, it would be better to have the
default web browser open the link, instead. So this is how the feature works
now. Personally, I liked the original behavior even though Word is not a
great web browser.
In order to get Word to open a web page in Word you need to click the "Open
Web Page" button on the Web toolbar and type or paste the URL you want to
open. Any subsequent links will open in your default web browser.
To set the default web browser you have to use Safari (Apple's way of
guaranteeing you'll never delete Safari I guess). Go to Safari's preferences
and you will see that you can set your Operating System's default browser
there.
This makes Bill Gates right when he says that the OS supplied browser is
part of the operating system.
-Jim
--
Jim Gordon
Mac MVP
MVPs are not Microsoft Employees
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