There are two broad types of links in Word documents. We’re all familiar with external links, usually to web sites.
External
External links are easy and most likely you use them often to add a link to an external web site from a Word document. As usual, there are more options available than the simple link.
- Grab a web link, usually from the address bar of a browser.
- Switch to Word
- Highlight the text you want to turn into a link.
- Press Alt + K (the common ‘make a link’ shortcut) or Insert | Links | Hyperlink
- Choose Existing File or Web Page
- Paste the web link into the address field.
- Click OK
Here’s the Insert Hyperlink dialog – pretty much unchanged for many versions of Office. There’s a lot available in this dialog beyond the obvious … let’s take a look.
Text to display
This is the text that will have a web link placed ‘underneath’ it. You can change that text from this line as well as in the document itself.
It’s a handy option for changing an ‘exposed’ web link into something with standard text.
An ‘exposed’ link is when you paste a web link directly into Word. Word detects that it’s a link and converts the pasted text into a web link it as the Address and the Text to Display.
If you open that link in the Insert Hyperlink dialog you can see the two elements match.
You can change the ‘Text to display’ to something else.
Screentip
ScreenTip (or Tooltip) is text that appears when you hover your mouse over the link.
It shows up in the document like this:
A long standing bug in Word (that continues in Word 2016) is that screentips don’t appear in PDF versions of Word documents. Here’s the same text/link in a PDF made by Word 2016.
Adobe’s PDF format support tooltips so it’s omission from Office’s ‘Save as PDF’ feature must be a deliberate and ongoing choice by Microsoft. Go figure.
Bookmark
Web pages can have sub-links within the page called Bookmarks. They are similar to bookmarks in Word documents. You see them in web links that end with a # plus the name of the bookmark e.g. faq.htm#privacy
( In HTML code the bookmark is made with the id attribute e.g. <p id=”privacy”> and a link to that bookmark on the same page as <a href=”#privacy”>Click for Privacy details</a> )
To do the same thing in Word, enter the web link in the Address field then click the Bookmark button. Wait while Word loads the web page then displays all the bookmarks on that page.
It’s usually easier and faster to use your browser to find the correct link with bookmark then paste it directly into the Address box.
Target Frame
This controls how the linked page will appear. This mostly applies if you’re using Word to make a web page.
Remove Link
Changes the selection to plain text with no link. Simple, but you can do the same thing faster by right-clicking on the link and choosing ‘Remove Hyperlink’.
Hyperlink styles
When you make a link, the style changes to ‘Hyperlink’. Change the Hyperlink style to change the color of links.
The above is the standard answer you’ll see echoed across the Internet … sadly it’s not complete nor totally useful. Here’s what’s really happening.
Links on web pages and in Office documents are different color depending on whether the link has been visited or not. Usually blue for unvisited, purple for visited.
So there’s really TWO styles in Word for links: Hyperlink (unvisited links) and FollowedHyperlink (visited links). FollowedHyperlink is hiding and you have to dig down to Styles | Options | Select styles to show .. All Styles then look down the long list.
It’s in these two styles that you can change the look of links – for example remove the underlining. You could also change both links to the same settings so there’s no visual difference between visited and unvisited links.
Link to text mismatch
Occasionally you might find the link text looks quite different to the surrounding non-linked text.
Here’s an example with text in a serif font but the link in a sans-serif font.
That can happen because the Hyperlink/FollowedHyperlink styles are based on the Default Character Font (see the FollowedHyperlink example above). There may be a mismatch if the main text is using another default.
The simple fix is to change the Hyperlink/FollowedHyperlink styles to match the required font.
