Relative Links Don't Work in Word Viewer

When you click to follow a relative hyperlink that was created with Internet Assistant, Microsoft Word Viewer 97-2000 cannot parse the link information and open the document.

Instead, the URL Open dialog box from Microsoft Internet Explorer appears.

This problem occurs if both of the following conditions are true:

• The hyperlink was created in Internet Assistant, an Internet add-in that you can use to create Web pages in earlier versions of Microsoft Word (versions earlier than Word 97).
• The link is a relative link. That is, rather than having a full path to the link, the location of the link is relative to the current directory.

Use the Internet Explorer URL Open dialog box that appears to go to the linked document.

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed in the "Applies to" section of this article.

You can use the Microsoft Word 97-2000 Viewer to view documents that were created in Microsoft Word 97, in Microsoft Word 2000, in Microsoft Word 2002, and in Microsoft Office Word 2003.

For additional information, click the following article number to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: