If you often create hyperlinks to a web page, this week’s tip will come in useful. I use this the most in email messages but it works equally well in Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
Let’s say you’ve found something on a web page that will be of interest to someone and you want to send an email to them with a link to the web page. You can just paste the web address into the email but I think it’s cleaner to create a hyperlink. I’ll often give some background in the email as to why I’m sending the link and then say something like ‘click here’. In this case I want the word ‘here’ to be a hyperlink.
The steps I follow to do this are:
- Type the text in your email. e.g. click here.
- Go to your browser and, assuming you are already on the page whose address you want to send, click in the address bar
- The entire web address is selected so you can just use Ctrl+C to copy it
- Switch back to your email
- If needed, click on the word ‘here’; you do not need to select the whole word
- Press Ctrl+K to open the Insert Hyperlink dialog box
- Press Ctrl+V to paste the web address in the Insert Hyperlink dialog box
- Press Enter to close the dialog box
When you use Insert Hyperlink, it automatically turns the whole word you have clicked on into a hyperlink. If you wanted several words to be used for the hyperlink, you’d need to select them first.
What I really like about this is how efficient the keyboard shortcuts make the process when I switch back to the email. It’s Ctrl+K, Ctrl+V, Enter and I’m done.