OFF95: Office Shortcut Bar Button to URL Shortcut May Not Work

If you have a button on the Office Shortcut Bar toolbar that points to a World Wide Web (WWW) site, the button may not work, and the WWW page to which the button points will not come up in your Internet Browser.

You may experience the problem if all of the following are true:

• You created a Windows shortcut, on your desktop for example, that is of type "Internet Shortcut," where the target URL for this shortcut is pointing to a WWW site.
  
  NOTE: From this point on, the location of your "Internet Shortcut" is assumed to be your desktop.
  
  -and-
• You used the Customize dialog box for the Office Shortcut Bar to add a button to an Office Shortcut Bar toolbar and this button points to this "Internet Shortcut."
  
  -and-
• You deleted the "Internet Shortcut" and left the Office Shortcut Bar toolbar button.

The problem is that the Internet Shortcut that you created on your desktop (or other location on your hard drive) is a different file type than the shortcut that is created on the Office Shortcut Bar toolbar. The Internet Shortcut has a .url extension and the shortcut on the Office Shortcut Bar has a .lnk extension and cannot have a URL as its target. There is no way to change this behavior of .lnk shortcuts.

To work around this problem, you can manually create an Office Shortcut Bar toolbar button instead of using the Office Shortcut Bar customize dialog box to create the button. You can manually create an Office Shortcut Bar toolbar button by moving or copying the URL shortcut that's on your desktop to the relevant Office Shortcut Bar toolbar folder. If you copy the URL shortcut to an Office Shortcut Bar toolbar folder, you can then delete the original shortcut and the Office Shortcut Bar button will still work.

NOTE: Toolbars on the Office Shortcut Bar are just folders within the C:\Msoffice\Office\Shortcut Bar folder. For example, if you want to add a URL shortcut to an Office Shortcut Bar toolbar called "test," move or copy the URL shortcut to the C:\Msoffice\Office\Shortcut Bar\test folder.

Microsoft has confirmed this to be a problem in the Microsoft products listed at the beginning of this article. We are researching this problem and will post new information here in the Microsoft Knowledge Base as it becomes available.