Ultra-fast method of creating hyperlinks in Microsoft Word

The most basic way of adding a “connector” from one part of Word document to another section, header or place is achieved by adding a bookmark followed by creating a hyperlink to that bookmark. This is a two-step process that involves using two different windows and a lot of typing and clicking.

There’s a much, much faster one-way method of achieving the same.

Let’s say, that you want to create a hyperlink to some header. For example, you want to point your reader to glossary in a middle of some text.

The ultra-fast way of achieving this includes:

1. Select header’s title text.
2. Drag selection with right mouse button to any other line.
3. Release right mouse button and select Create hyperlink here.

Done. In single drag’n’drop operation both bookmark and a hyperlink to that bookmark has been created.

You can use exactly the same approach for creating external hyperlinks (pointing to some other document or file), by dragging file from Windows Explorer into Word document, again with right mouse button pressed.

Things to remember:

• created internal link is always… internal; it contains bookmark only in Address; it does not contain path and filename in destination; if you paste it to another document, it won’t work,
• created external link always points to entire document (file) itself; Word does not create internal bookmark in this case; you cannot create a link to external document and to particular bookmark or place in it, using this method,
• created external link always contains full path in both Address and in Text to display fields, which may be unwanted; you need to click Hyperlink button on the Insert tab (or press Ctrl+Alt+H) and manually change displayed hyperlink’s text to fix this.

With this method you can create hyperlink in any position, even right after line, which it points to, and then simply move it to some destination, by simply selecting created hyperlink, cutting it to clipboard (Ctrl+X) and pasting it at destination (Ctrl+V).