effective way to manage breaking hyperlinks between word documents?

[norman1nz]

hi there,
We have a folder structure with thousands of documents with an average of maybe two hyperlinks in each to others..
When a file is moved or renamed, all the links to this will break and we have no way to know which other documents are referencing that document and need their links updated..

I'm sure this must be a reasonably common problem but I can't find any good solutions to this on google (the nearest thing i can find is linkbreeze - which seems to have development stalled and hasnt been released)

Does anybody have any suggestions to manage this or know of any software we could get to help out?
there would be thousands of broken links already so a complete rehaul would not be out of the question

 

[macropod]

Hi norman1nz,

If the paths between the source and target folders are complex, you could use my Field Link Updater, available at:

http://www.wopr.com/cgi-bin/w3t/showthreaded.pl?Number=261488

Alternatively, if the paths between the source and target folders relatively simple, you could the solution I've
posted at:

http://www.wopr.com/cgi-bin/w3t/showthreaded.pl?Number=670027

Cheers

[MS MVP - Word]

 

[fumei]

Once again, two thumbs up for macropod.

faq219-2884

Gerry
My paintings and sculpture

 

[norman1nz]

Hey thanks for the response macropod
Do you know whether this works for office 2007?

I did a bit of testing and found that office 2007 converts relative URL's or URL's containing mapped drives into fully qualified if it can resolve them..
Office 2003 seems to do the opposite

For example:
If I map J: drive to \\server1\folder1\ and edit an existing hyperlink to use J:, word 2007 will convert this J:\folder2\document.doc hyperlink into a fully qualified \\server1\folder1\folder2\document.doc hyperlink in the Ctrl+K dialogue the first time, but you have to edit this same link again to change the underlying Alt+F9 links to be consistent.

Then if you open the document with Word 2003 and save it (don’t have to make any changes) it will convert every fully qualified link inconsistently into a “relative” link
e.g. \\server1\folder1\folder2\document.doc could be changed to ..\..\..\folder1\folder2\document.doc or ..\..\..\..\..\..\folder1\folder2\document.doc
Even the same link to the same file in two different documents can have different numbers of ..\..\ and usually there are more of these “up a level” portions than there are even levels to go up...


Also i contacted the vendor of LinkBreeze - and this is indeed an abandoned project, however he referred me to linkfixerplus which seems to do the exact same job..

 

[macropod]

Hi norman1nz,

I think the only reason you're seeing the links displayed as ..\..\..\folder1\folder2\document.doc or ..\..\..\..\..\..\folder1\folder2\document.doc is that Word is unable to display the full paths in the hyperlink field display. Bear in mind that the solutions I pointed you to don't update the displayed values. IMHO, it's not good practice to hard-code the paths into the displayed text - a descriptive text is usually more appropriate.

If you were to press Alt-F9 to toggle the field code display, I imagine you'd see the full paths for the fields embedded in the field coding. Regardless of what is displayed, however, Word stores the full, absolute, path internally.

Cheers

[MS MVP - Word]

 

[norman1nz]

Thanks again macropod

ok so the ..\..\..\..\..\..\folder1\folder2\document.doc kind of path when there is only one or two levels possible to go up is not a common issue with Word 2003 then?
I think the Word03 computer for this was office SP2..

The ..\..\..\..\..\..\folder1\folder2\document.doc appears both in the Alt+F9 and Ctrl+K - regardless of what the text for the link is (e.g. Click Here).

In the testing I've done I recall Word07 could not resolve ..\..\..\..\..\..\folder1\folder2\document.doc to \\server1\folder1\folder2\document.doc - but the same document opened in word03 could resolve it (though I have no idea how as the fully qualified path was not stored in either Alt+F9 and Ctrl+K).

Word 2007 is the platform we will be ultimately using so we'd be needing a solution for that and the above shouldn't be a problem there.


I've been testing linkfixerplus - however this can't recognise links in documents (even .doc / 97-03 format) saved by 2007
otherwise would be ideal hmph!


Also took a quick look at those links but got a bit confused... Would what applies to {INCLUDEPICTURE}
apply the same to {HYPERLINK}?

 

[macropod]

Hi norman1nz,

I note that, in your posts, you refer to the paths in the fields as being separated by single '\'. If that's what you're using, I'd expect problems - Word requires '\\' or '/' as the path separators - not that '/' is mentioned in any official documentation I've ever seen.

AFAIK, the incomplete path display is common across all versions of Word. Either way, the solutions I referred you to should work for all versions of Word, from '97 on. One way you might be able to force Word to retain the paths as input is to use '/' as the path separator instead of '\\'.

Yes, I'd expect the same 'rules' to apply to INCLUDEPICTURE fields.

Cheers

[MS MVP - Word]