Mac – How to stop Word 2011 opening hyperlinks on click

macmicrosoft wordmicrosoft-word-2011

In previous versions of MS Word, there was a preference for the action to be taken when the user clicked a hyperlink: open it, or edit it. Word 2011 appears to have defaulted to opening the hyperlink, and I can't find the preference to change this behaviour.

How can I change Word's default behaviour when a hyperlink is clicked to be editing the text of the hyperlink? Holding down a modifier key when clicking is not an acceptable solution, as the aim here is to prevent misclicks from causing web pages to open.

Edit: the links need to stay as links in the saved document. But when clicked on my machine, they should not open. Word needs to default to just editing the link, so an inaccurate click does not take me out of the document into Safari. Older versions of Word had a preference controlling this, and Microsoft seem to have removed it and fixed the behavior at the unsafe option in order to satisfy the point-and-drool crowd.

Best Answer

I went looking for this for the same reason - it isn't on the preferences menus anywhere. Just by chance, I discovered that if you use Ctrl+Click (the default for Windows), it doesn't open the link when you click. My links were behind pictures not words, but I would suspect it'll work the same way.

Related Solutions

Word – How to format all hyperlinks in a Word document

With the document open, press Alt+F11 to get the Visual Basic editor window.
Choose Insert -> Module to get a blank code editor and paste in the following:

Sub ApplyHyperlinkStyleToAllLinksInDoc()
  For Each link In ActiveDocument.Hyperlinks
    link.Range.Style = ActiveDocument.Styles("Hyperlink")
  Next
End Sub

Then highlight this code and press Run (or F5).

As with any macro, you should probably save the document before running.

If you want to customize the hyperlink style for the whole document:

Open the Styles pane as indicated in the question.
Hover over Hyperlink so that a small drop-down arrow appears to the right of the word "Hyperlink."
Click that dropdown and choose Modify, to get the Modify Style dialog.
Change any desired options (color, underline, etc.). Some options are hiding in drop-down Format box in the lower-left corner which lets you set formatting options for Font (including small caps etc.), Border, etc.
Choose OK, and the changes should apply to all links styled as Hyperlink, which if you ran the code above should be all links.

You can save the code module in Normal instead of the specific document and even assign a toolbar button or keyboard shortcut if you want to use it on a bunch of documents more quickly. You can also change the Style alterations in the Normal template if you want them to apply to new documents as well.

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Word – How to format all hyperlinks in a Word document

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