[ March 2007 ]

Happy St. Patrick's Day everyone! We're all a bit Irish on the seventeenth of this month now aren't we?

We're seeing some warmer weather now and hopefully all the snow is done for another year! There are leaf buds on my trees and they're a sure harbinger of spring, as well as the song of the peepers at night. I love that sound!

Shamrock

Carol's Signature

Table of Contents

Create Hyperlinks from One Word Document to Another- Readers can click on a link to go to another document

Prevent Changes to Hyperlinks in your Word Documents - Make it harder to change your links

AutoText in Word 2007 -A way around disabled AutoComplete

Create Hyperlinks from One Word Document to Another

I bet you didn't know that you can link documents together in MS Word. Well guess what? You can!

You can hyperlink documents together so that the folks who read them can click on a hyperlink that will take them to a previous document that is referred to in the instant document. Say you've written to a colleague asking them to use information from a sales database to create a mail merge letter announcing the Spring sale. You can create a hyperlink to a document instructing them how to create a merge letter.

Word makes it super easy to link to information in other documents. To insert hyperlinks in your documents, follow the steps below.

  1. Launch MS Word if it isn't already open.
  2. Open both documents in Word and go to Window | Arrange All.
  3. Select the definition of the term mail merge in your previous document.
  4. Right-click the selected text, then click and drag the selected text to the end of this sentence in the new document: This article described the latest instructions on performing a mail merge.
  5. Release the mouse button and select Create Hyperlink here.

When readers come to the term "mail merge" in your new document then can press CTRL and then click the hyperlink to the term in the previous article.

If you are saving your particular article on the Web, you should save both of the articles' files to the same folder to avoid having problems with broken links.

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Prevent Users from Changing Hyperlinks in Documents

Sometimes, folks may inadvertently change the Web hyperlinks in your Word documents simply because its so easy for them to accidentally change a link by following it. I'll show you how to make it a bit more difficult for readers to change your links.

When you add a hyperlink to a Word document, you can go to the site by pressing CTRL and clicking your mouse on the link at the same time.

If you want to edit the hyperlink text, you have to click inside it and make your changes. While you are workiing on the document, you want to be able to easily edit it, so this default setting is very handy for you. However, you may not want your readers to have the ability to change the hyperlink. To prevent readers from inadvertently changing the link, you can change the default setting by following the steps below.

  1. Go to Tools | Options.
  2. Click the Edit tab.
  3. Under Editing options, clear the check mark in the Use CTRL + Click To Follow Hyperlink check box.

Now, when the reader clicks on the hyperlink, the page will connect directly to the location of the Web page. They will have to press CTRL + Link to edit it.

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AutoText in Word 2007

AutoComplete has been disabled in Word 2007 due to the enormous quantity of Building Blocks (the expanded successor to AutoText) that would otherwise cause AutoComplete to occur just about all the time.

To force completion after typing the first four characters, you'll need to press the F3 key. This will work with any Building Block, not just AutoText. But, it will work only if there are no other entries that begin with the same four letters.

Some users are finding it useful to use AutoCorrect entries instead of AutoText entries as a work-around, and to purposely create short names that match what they were typing in Word 2003 and earlier. There is still no AutoComplete display, but typing any Word separator (space, period, comma, etc.) will trigger that automatic change from the short name into the expanded form.

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