Office 2008 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual

Hyperlinks

Hyperlinks —buttons, graphics, or text phrases that, when clicked, take you to a different document—are what Web sites are all about. In Word, you can make just about any kind of link you’ve ever dreamed of—links to Web pages, to other documents or pages you’ve created, to movies or sound files, or to a point in the same document or another document.

Note

The Edit Hyperlink dialog box, which you’ll use in this section, has a Document tab that’s supposed to let you create a hyperlink to a document anywhere on your computer. But, as of this writing, it’s exceptionally flaky and doesn’t function at all using Tiger (10.4). In Leopard (10.5) it works, but opens a linked Word document in Draft view—which can be disconcerting since the page appears completely blank if it’s actually a Publishing Layout view document.

Linking to Another Place

If your document is long, you may want links to help your reader navigate it. For instance, on a Web page (or even a senior thesis), you can place a link called “Back to top” at the bottom of your page, or a list of links at the top of the page that link to paragraphs farther down. Either way, this can save your reader lots of scrolling.

If you’ve used Word bookmarks (see Bookmarks) or its built-in heading styles in the target document, you can use them as anchors—the targets—for your links, like this:

1. Select the text (“Back to top,” for example) or graphic that will be the hyperlink; choose Insert → Hyperlink.

   The Insert Hyperlink dialog box opens, ...