OFFXP: Problems with Hyperlinks in Office XP Documents You Open with Earlier Versions of Office

When you click a hyperlink in a document that was originally created in Microsoft Office XP, you may receive the following error message: This symptom occurs after you open the Office XP document by using a Microsoft Office 2000 or Microsoft Office 97 program.

This problem may occur if all the following conditions exist:

• The Office XP document contains a hyperlink to another Office document.
• Both the Office XP document that contains the hyperlink and the destination document are located in different folders on the same drive or on different folders on the same server.
• You use Office 2000 or Office 97 to open the Office XP document that contains the hyperlink.

Under the following conditions, the hyperlink uses a relative path to refer to the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) of the destination file:

• You create a hyperlink to an Office document from another Office document.
• Both files are located on the same drive or on the same server.

In Office XP, the relative path in a hyperlink uses a forward slash (/). In Office 2000 and Office 97, the relative path in a hyperlink uses a backslash (\). Because of this, when you use an Office 2000 or Office 97 program to open a file that contains a hyperlink that was created in Office XP, the Office 2000 or Office 97 program does not recognize the path to the destination file, and the symptom occurs.

To work around this problem, open the file in an Office 2000 or Office 97 program, and then edit the hyperlink to use back slash characters (\) in the path to the destination file. To do so, follow these steps:

1. Start the Office 2000 or the Office 97 program, and then open the file that contains the hyperlink.
2. Right-click the hyperlink, point to Hyperlink, and then click Edit Hyperlink.
3. In the Type the file or Web page name box of the Edit Hyperlink dialog box, replace each forward slash (/) in the path to the destination file with a backslash (\).
   
   For example, if the path is
   ../MyFolder/MyDoc.xls
   edit the path to:
   ..\MyFolder\MyDoc.xls
4. Click OK.
5. On the File menu, click Save. In the Save As dialog box, type a name for the file, click a folder in which to save the file, and then click Save.

Microsoft has confirmed that this is a problem in the Microsoft products that are listed at the beginning of this article.

An absolute path in a hyperlink refers to the destination document by using its complete 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 in which the hyperlink is contained. For example, the c:\My Documents\Reports.htm file has absolute and relative hyperlinks to the c:\My Documents\Departments\Marketing.doc file. The absolute hyperlink uses c:\My Documents\Departments\Marketing.doc as its path. The relative hyperlink uses Departments\Marketing.doc as its path.