Hands on: Word challenges

We’ve dealt with various aspects of Word hyperlinks before, but reader Jan Owen had a new challenge.

She wanted to be able to look up entries in a glossary document from another file, so the hyperlinks needed to point to a particular place in the target document.

This is indeed possible. You first need to insert bookmarks in the target document, save it and close it. Next, in the document you want to link from, select the text or object you want to attach the link to, then Insert, Hyperlink.

In the ‘Link to:’ section, select ‘Existing File or Web page’, then use the browse button above the right-hand pane to navigate to the target document. Select this, then click on the Bookmark button. This will produce a list of all the bookmarks in the target document - select the one you want and OK out of both dialogues.

You’ll then see your link formatted in blue with an underline. If you’d rather these links were shown in a different format, then you can edit the Hyperlink style.

When you’ve got a few links in place, try them out. When I did this, I first got an annoying warning about opening the target document - ‘Hyperlinks can be harmful…’ - and then none of the links worked properly. They opened the target document, certainly, or switched to it if already open, but the cursor sat blinking stubbornly at the beginning of the document.

Having checked everything - both the link text and the field codes seemed correct - I was at the point of shelving this for another month, when I remembered the answer to the first annoyance. We covered this in our last foray into hyperlinks, except that concerned TIFF files. The cure is similar. Go to Windows Explorer’s Folder Options, File Types, scroll to DOC and click Advanced. Untick the box marked ‘Confirm open after download’ and the warnings will go away.

Strangely enough, the answer to the bookmark problem was also in that mon th’s Windows column, though in a cryptic way. The problem then was of Word or Excel bookmarks to image files, which wouldn’t open the image in the default application, but opened instead in Internet Explorer or another program.

The answer to that was to create a DWORD Registry entry at HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE \Software\
Microsoft \Office \9.0 \Common\ Internet named ForceShellExecute and set its value to one. Setting this back to zero cured the problem - the hyperlinks now homed in on the appropriate bookmark.

So, I leave you with the dilemma - do you want your inter-document bookmark links to work correctly or would you prefer to have image links working correctly? And if anyone has succeeded in making both work, I’d be delighted to hear about it.

Speech in Vista
Last month we looked at the speech-recognition features in Windows Vista and Office 2007, and since then I’ve had a chance to try it out with two online word processors. We’ve mentioned Google Docs and Spreadsheets before, when it was known as Writely, and Thinkfree, the Java-based online office suite. Anyway, the former accepts dictation just fine via Internet Explorer (but not Firefox), while the latter doesn’t.