Suzanne, Fred, Many thanks for getting back to me on this one.

Fred: I think you are saying that, for you, Word *doesn't* convert absolute
hyperlinks to relative if you use a full absolute path, in the form
\\servername\volume\folder1\folder2\...\docname.do c, in the hyperlink
destination box.

That is *not* my experience - Word automatically converts even this into a
relative path.

I don't know why it does this: it's not at all helpful, and presumably it
would have been less work for the Word programmers not have implemented this
feature.

Unfortunately I don't have access to the exact version of Word/Windows I use
in my workplace right now, but I believe it's Word 2002 running on Windows
XP. I'll do yet more experimentation with this in the office tomorrow and try
and post some specific details of the behaviour of my version of Word in
various situations, in the hope this will shed a little more light here.

Thanks again, M