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Active hyperlinks in mail merge
I have active hyperlinks in my Excel spreadsheet that I am using as a data
source for a mail merge. Is there any way to create the hyperlinks in Excel that they will carry through the mail merge process? Thanks, cj |
#2
Posted to microsoft.public.word.mailmerge.fields
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Active hyperlinks in mail merge
As far as I know there is no way to insert a complete hyperlink in Excel
into Word during a mailmerge using the out-of-the-box mailmerge, assuming that the "link text" (the URL you want to link to) and the "display text" can be different from each other. The main problem there is that only the display text reaches Word, no matter which "connection method" you use (OLE DB, DDE, ODBC) to get your Excel data. So, if you want separate link text and display text, you will need a column for each one in your Excel sheet. The other problem is how to get Word's Display text to update. Typically, when you /update/ a hyperlink field in Word, only the link text ever changes. So if you have a column like this myhl http://www.mysitea.xxx http://www.mysiteb.xxx and you use a nested field like this; { HYPERLINK { MERGEFIELD myhl } } then the link text will be updated but not the display text. That's fine if you /want/ the display text to be the same in every record, e.g. "Your documents" However, I have looked at this again and the following seems to work in Word 2007 - and perhaps earlier versions of Word. Let's suppose first that the link text matches the display text in each record. 1. Insert the nested field as above (you need to use ctrl-F9 to insert each pair of the special field braces {} ) 2. Select the nested fields and use F9 to update the result. 3. Use Alt-F9 to dislpay the result. You should see a "display text", typically underlined in blue. Let's say it is www.mysitea.xxx 4. Click after the first character of the display text (if you have Word set up so that hyperlinks are followed on an ordinary click rather than the default ctrl-click, the link will be followed, but when you come back to Word, the insertion point should be where you clicked). 5. Use ctrl-F9 to insert a pair of the special field braces { } 6. Between the braces, type MERGEFIELD, then the name of the field you want to use for the display text., so you end up with e.g. w{ MERGEFIELD myhl }ww.mysitex.xxx 7. Delete the old display text so you just end up with the { MERGEFIELD myhl } 8. merge to a new document and test the new links. If you need different display and link texts for each record, you will need e.g. { HYPERLINK { MERGEFIELD mylinktextfield } } and a separate display text field, e.g. { MERGEFIELD myhl } or { MERGEFIELD mydisplaytextfield } (substituting your own field names). I have not tried this approach with versions of Word earlier than Word 2007, or with merges to email. I don't remember getting it to work before - perhaps I did not do quite the right thing, or maybe something has changed. Otherwise, it does seem to work, and it even works after you save/close and re-open the document (not always the case when you're dealing with links in Word). To me, a significant problem is that it's not very maintainable - it's difficult to see what you have done because when you Alt-F9, you only get to see the nested [ HYPERLINK } field, not the "display text" field. I would be interested to hear if it works for you. If not, the only other approach I know is to use VBA to maintain the complete link, typically using Word's MailMerge events so that the VBA runs once for each record in the data source. You can probably find examples of that by searching groups.google.com for peter jamieson hyperlink Peter Jamieson http://tips.pjmsn.me.uk cjshaffer wrote: I have active hyperlinks in my Excel spreadsheet that I am using as a data source for a mail merge. Is there any way to create the hyperlinks in Excel that they will carry through the mail merge process? Thanks, cj |
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