This article explains how to replace absolute hyperlink references with relative ones, which makes your Microsoft Word document and linked files portable. So when you send them to a different computer, clicking on the hyperlink will open the file that you shipped with the Word document and not try to open the file that is on the computer where you wrote the document.
Say you are writing a final report for a survey and you have a link to the original contract, which is in a folder in the same directory as your report.You burn the Word document and the folder with the contract file on to a DVD and send it to out to the survey’s project manager. Then the project manager complains that the link doesn’t work. Instead of trying to open the file on the DVD, the link is trying to open the file that is on the computer that you wrote the Word report on.
- Select “File > Options”
- Select “Advanced”
- Scroll down to “General” and select “Web Options”
- Select the Files tab
{HYPERLINK “file:///\\\\v07-fnp\\Ship\\Projects\\03_Past_Surveys\\survey\\11_Reports\\04_End_of_Job\\FT_Processing_Report_v2\\Appendix\\13%20Post%20Processing%20after%20PreSTM\\Survey_Report_v1.pdf”}
You have an absolute link, which will try to open a file on v07-fnp\\Ship, which is unfortunate as this is a server on a survey ship. We need to use Word’s search and replace function to get rid of the bumf at the start.
Search on:
file:///\\\\v07-fnp\\Ship\\Projects\\03_Past_Surveys\\survey\\11_Reports\\04_End_of_Job\\FT_Processing_Report_v2\\
replace with
<intentionally left blank>
One more search and replace should be done. For whatever reason, we need to replace all ‘\\’ with ‘/’.
The information in this post should help you to get your links working correctly in your Microsoft Word documents in Office 2013. I am required to use Microsoft products at work. Life is simpler with Linux. But that is a topic for a different post.