Replies

Thanks, Phil. I’m not sure I understand what to add it to – do you mean right after the hyperlink, you add that? So http://some/link.htm/n? That’s in the dialog box where you set up the link?

Fred, thanks for your last posting. I wish I had been busier and not got around to updating the document already – I’d have saved some time on both the advice to not bother deleting the old bookmarks and on using the shortcut keys. I don’t know whether I’m pleased or not to now be such an expert on redoing bookmarks! I was totally surprised about being able to just move the bookmarks by setting a new one of the same name.

Three totally useful great replies. I’ll put all my responses in this one posting, since Fred has followed me and this problem around from Excel to here, and you’re exactly right, Fred, that now I’m just worried about maintenance down the road in the Word doc.

Sorry to confuse you Charles – I didn’t mean Word sections but rather what you suspected. Howard and Fred, I understand now why the bookmarks hadn’t moved, though I moved the chapters in outline view so I hadn’t thought that could pick up the text without the bookmark. Wrongo. And yes, yesterday I just learned (from another posting, I think) about showing bookmarks and how to know the name. I have the bookmark names in the chapter names to make it easy to know where to find the corresponding Word chapter from Excel, so I don’t require a macro in this case (and someone mentioned some character combo to display the bookmark name, which I’ll look up when I need it – archives are so useful).

Charles, I suppose it was also because of the bookmarks’ being ahead of the heading text that they were not deleted when the chapters were deleted, but they were still there and Going to them went to other chapter headings. In the new position, the bookmarks are deleted when the chapters are deleted.

Fred, I think I’ve done what you suggested about moving the bookmark to the end of the heading text, followed by a space. When you say you need to be careful, you mean careful not to inadvertently delete the bookmark? I’ve put them in as, for example,
2. ACTIVITY_CODES – New Activity Codes ]
followed by the paragraph mark (] is the bookmark). I have to hope that the extra space doesn’t push a heading to a new line in the table of contents! You were all correct- in this position, the bookmarks moved when the chapters were moved.

Fred, re your last question, when the links weren’t working, I noticed that one of the non-working ones showed a whole word as the bookmark and that it was different from the others. When I changed it to just the position in front of the text, it started working. That could, of course, be totally a red herring. I have no idea what made things start working. Your faith that they could, probably. I may have originally just not wanted the text bookmarked so I could copy it and paste it elsewhere. It’s a year ago now and I don’t remember.

Ta da! They all work. Right now.

The secret is a rule I’ve been aware of for a long time: you have to really really want it to work and have to redo what you know is the right procedure seven times. Thanks to all the people to confirmed that it should work.

I’m going home before I run into the ‘two-clicks on a hyperlink and it dies’ rule.

The other thing that is happening is that some of the links go to the heading in the table of contents for the section that has the bookmark instead of going to the bookmark. I’ve deleted the bookmarks for these and re-added them, then redone the TOC, then redone the link in Excel. I also removed some bookmarks that were no longer being used. In one case that fixed it. In another, it didn’t.

I haven’t tried your entirely new locations idea. I’d still have to redo the links when I move the documents to their real location. Every time I set a link, I remove the old one, then do the new one as a separate operation.

Well, I’m way ahead of where I was before. Today anyway.

Thanks, Fred and unkamunka. I’m looking at both files in their native application. I just always have the web toolbar available, so I don’t know about its popping up. I would expect MS to have got this working better by Office 2000.

See my reply saying redoing the bookmarks worked and I hoped it would continue to work. Well, that didn’t take long to dash my hopes.

What I think I’ve just learned (though I can’t be sure) is that the links I’ve set by clicking on the browse button work, but when I’ve selected the path from the drop-down list of previous links, they don’t. I have my doubts, though, because surely I tested that before I went and did them all that way. I didn’t use the dropdown list until I had used the browse button many times. Maybe it gets populated from the already set (not funtioning) hyperlinks and not from the new ones I’ve set. I’d have thought that was just text characters in that box and it wouldn’t matter as long as it read the same way. Or maybe links only have a shelf-life of two tries and then they die. Hey Fred, did you test yours three times? Nevermind.

Don’t knock the stray thoughts. I’d have said that it wasn’t an earlier version of Word/Excel (it was just about one year ago), but this nudged me to redo the links. They read the same, but right now, they seem to work!

It’s terribly inconsistent. The first time I tested it, I didn’t lose the Excel file (so was able to click on Excel on the taskbar); then I closed the Excel file and opened it again, and then when I tried it, I did lose the Excel file so I had to use the back arrow on the web toolbar. But the links still worked. I wonder if there’s some rule operating that I could explain to people (and myself) re: when you can click on the taskbar and when you need to use the web toolbar.

I see that the web toolbar being available goes with the user’s profile, not the file, unless I activate it via a macro. I wasn’t successful before in getting a macro to stay with a file.

I hope I don’t have to write back later to say it was just some peculiar set of circumstances that made it work. It’s doing just what I want.

Thanks for looking after me today, unkamunka (in the Outlook group as well!).

I noticed on my hotmail account that there was spam with my hotmail id as the SENDER as well as the recipient.

Actually, once I clued into the error factor with the spam filer and started paying attention to my delete folder, I find that I hardly get any spam on my real email id at home. I wish I could tell you all how I got off those lists.

Thanks, David. The filter readme is exactly what I was hoping I could see. I’ll have to check when I get back home, but I think in the note that got caught, the writer may have referred to her ‘dear friend’.

Thanks for the reply Fred. I wish I had the same results as you. Everything I did was the same up to where the Word doc opened from the Excel link to the correct bookmark. But when you say “I then clicked on the Excel task on the task bar. Excel came forward”, when I did that, an empty Excel window came forward. Problem 1. That’s a different thread somewhere, and I think there’s no answer for that either. I don’t know why that works in the obviously reasonable way for you. The only way for me to get back to the spreadsheet is to hit the back arrow on the web toolbar.

After I hit the back arrow, when I click on another hyperlink, nothing apparently happens. Word does not activate. When I then click on Word on the taskbar, it has not moved from the first bookmark to the one whose hyperlink I just clicked.

These documents are on an NT LAN. Maybe that’s what makes a difference.

Yes, [mm]:ss – that’s it . Thanks, Legare. I still needed to have the 0: entered for the hours for it to display correctly (I’m adding this comment for my benefit next time when I try to remember how this works).

Thanks for the reply, Legare. I suppose it’s adding it correctly, giving me 1:19:45 as a result, leaving me to do the mod 60 myself to get 79 minutes.

It will look at bit dorky on my CD cover (I don’t have a CD burner with its accompanying software, so I was going to do the cover in Excel or Word) when it shows the time for the first track as 0:06:58 and the total time as 1:19:45. Is there a way to format it to display just the minutes and seconds (what’s the [h]: for if not to hide the hours when there aren’t any?, but it’s not hiding them) and to give the total of minutes without converting to hours for the total?

I do always use the web toolbar; in this case, I was trying to provide hyperlinks to specific bookmarks. But if that’s not going to work, I should at least remember to save the web toolbar activated in the documents, so your comment was helpful. Thanks.

Thanks for the link to the KB articles. I’ve looked them over and several seem to imply that it’s not going to work correctly, though none that I found states my problem exactly. I’m totally flummoxed. I suppose if the hyperlinks are going to work only very occasionally, I may as well not bother putting them in the Excel file. I can have one link to the Word doc and let people do their own navigating, if that’s what they’ll generally have to do.

The files have both existed for a long time – it’s not a matter of their being unsaved files.