You receive an error message when you click a link to an Office document in Visio 2002

When you click a hyperlink on a Web page that you made from a Microsoft Visio drawing, you may receive the following error message in your browser window: This issue may occur if you do the following:

1. You save a Visio drawing as a Web page.
2. You publish the page to a Web server.
3. You view the page in a browser.

This behavior may occur if the hyperlink refers to a Microsoft Office document as its destination and uses an absolute path to the Office document. When you save a Visio drawing that contains hyperlinks to Office documents as a Web page, the hyperlinks use absolute paths instead of relative paths. As a result, when you access the page from the Web server, the hyperlinks may not refer to the correct location to the Office documents, and you experience the behavior that is described in the "Symptoms" section of this article.

To resolve this problem, use one of the following methods, as appropriate to your situation.

Method 1

1. Upload the Office files that are referred to by the hyperlinks in your Web page to the Web server.
2. Create the hyperlinks by using the correct location for the Office documents before you save the Visio drawing as a Web page.

Method 2

Change the absolute paths in the hyperlinks to relative paths after you save the Visio drawing as a Web page.

An absolute path in a hyperlink refers to the destination document by using its complete Uniform Resource Locator (URL). This includes the protocol, Web server, the path to the file, and the file name.

A relative path in a hyperlink uses a URL that is relative to the URL of the Web page that the hyperlink is contained in. For example, the C:\My Documents\Reports.htm file has absolute and relative hyperlinks to C:\My Documents\Departments\Marketing.doc. The absolute hyperlink uses C:\My Documents\Departments\Marketing.doc as its path. The relative hyperlink uses Departments\Marketing.doc as its path.

Use relative paths in hyperlinks if you want to move or copy your HTML files to another location, such as a Web server.