I'm using Word 2007. I created a massive (300 page) Word document by copy-pasting text, tables and images from various external (Word and Excel) documents. This might not have been the best way but I needed a quick sample document which I managed in the end.
The problem is, along with the text and data, some links got copied over to the new Word document too. I don't want any external links in my Word document; I want it completely separate from all the documents I copied data from. So I broke links by going to the 'Office Button' > Prepare > Edit Links to files, selected all links and clicked 'Break links'. All existing links got broken, but one remained:
I have NO idea what this NULL source file is and am not able to break this link. When I try to update all my fields by doing ctrl+A and F9, I get the following error message:
This is really frustrating, as I just cannot locate the faulty link. I've scanned through my entire (300 page) document and still couldn't find a way to locate where this 'chart' object is.
Has anyone else experienced a similar problem in Word 2007/2010? Any help on how to locate the faulty link or break it would be greatly appreciated!
Best Answer
I fixed this problem relatively easily by going to to the 'Office Button' > Prepare > Edit Links to files, and selecting 'Change Source'.
I basically changed the source to a random blank Excel workbook within the same directory as the word document. After this, I carefully scanned through all Excel charts in my document. The faulty chart was caught red-handed and showed up as a blank Excel plot, as follows:
I just had to delete the chart and the link automatically broke.
SUMMARY: Break all links, find that there is one NULL source (or many) in the document, and then specify a pseudo-source Excel sheet. Only the chart with the external link shows up as a blank chart. All correctly copied charts that are clean (not linked to the external workbook) have no such issues.