How to Create Hyperlinks in Microsoft Word 2013

Microsoft Word 2013 includes Hyperlink functionality, which can be used in several ways.

Cross-reference links can be created by selecting Cross-reference in the Links drop-down menu. These links allow users to connect objects within the document and move from one to the other by clicking on the link.

Hyperlinks are created by selecting Hyperlink in the aforementioned Links drop-down menu. This link, when clicked, prompts the user’s web browser to navigate to the designated web URL.

New to Word 2013 is the ability to incorporate online Videos which can be embedded into the document and played.

Watch the free video here, transcripts for the entire video follow:

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Video transcripts:

Welcome back to our course on Word 2013. In this section, I’m going to take a quick introductory look at Hyperlinks.

Now we’ve already seen a couple of hyperlinks, although I didn’t really refer to them with that term at the time. And what we’re going to do here is we’re going to put a bit of structure into our top five movies document by using hyperlinks.

Now this table is the one that I produced earlier for my top five movies. You should have something similar available. And the first thing I’ve done is to type a document heading here, My Top 10. I’m going to go to the Home tab and I’m going to make that into a Heading level 1. I’ll put in another line in after it, and then I’m going to put in a section that’s going to be the section for Skyfall. So I type in Skyfall, make that into a Heading 1 as well, blank lines after that. Now let me put the next movie in, Heading 1. So in that way, I can build up the beginnings of a document with not only the table showing my top five movies but I’m also going to put a little bit of information about each of those five movies in as well. Now incidentally, I got rid of that underlining under Skyfall by just adding it to my dictionary so that the auto-correct check didn’t show it up as a potential spelling error

Now let me go into the table and for the movie Skyfall, I’m going to select Skyfall, just swipe over it with the mouse, and then on the Insert tab I’m going to go into Links and what I’m going to do is to choose Cross-reference. Now I’m going to put in a cross-reference link from the word I’ve selected which is the word Skyfall in the table to the heading Skyfall. Now the reference types available to me are links to headings, bookmarks, footnotes, endnotes, equations, figures, and tables. So at any time I can put a link from my document to one of those things. Now we’ve certainly looked at tables. Figures will typically be our graphics. We haven’t put any equations, endnotes, footnotes in. One or two bookmarks are in implicitly because of other things, but we haven’t looked at bookmarks in detail. But we certainly have looked at headings. And if I click on heading, the headings in my document are listed. Now in this case, I want the heading Skyfall. Now if I click Insert and then Close, what I’ve done is to insert a link from the word Skyfall in this table to the Skyfall heading in my document. Now the way this shows up is if I just hover over Skyfall in the table, I don’t see anything particular happen, but note the screen tip there: Control and click to follow the link. So let me just hold the Control key down and now I get the pointing finger. And if I click on Skyfall with the Control key held down, the cursor goes to Skyfall, the beginning of that section.

So obviously, similarly if I selected Zero Dark Thirty, went to Insert, Link, Cross-reference, Heading, put in Zero Dark Thirty, insert that link, and close. Now if I hover over Zero Dark Thirty with the Control key held down, it’ll take me to that section in the document. So that’s how I setup basic hyperlinks within my document.

Now I’m in Internet Explorer and I’m looking at a review of Skyfall. It’s a review on Empire. I don’t know where you read your movie reviews, maybe IMDB or Empire. Let’s look at the Empire one here and the Empire review is pretty comprehensive and it includes a cast list. It’s got a lot of information about the movie as well as quite a few ads, of course. In the URL, if I click it within Internet Explorer or whichever other browser you use and then press Control-C to copy that I copy the URL to the Clipboard and what I’m now going to do is to paste that URL into my document. So I’ve copied it with Control-C. Let’s go back to the document.

So now let me under Skyfall within the section there, I’m going to say “For a review see” and now I’m going to insert again a link, but this time instead of cross-reference, I’m going to choose Hyperlink. And it gives me the option here of inserting a hyperlink in the address. Now I can paste the address, I just copied from Empire and all I’d need to do to that with the keyboard is Control-V, the link is there, and click on OK and I’ve now got a link in my document, let me put a blank line at the beginning there, I’ve now got a link in my document to that review. If I hover over it, again nothing particular happens other than the screen tip. Hold the Control key down though and I’ve got my pointing finger. If I click on that I’ll actually go to the review, the movie review on Empire.

So there we are. I’ve got a link from Skyfall to the section about Skyfall. I could put my own review in here. I could maybe copy and paste in the cast list, do anything I like really. But importantly, I’ve also got a link to a URL, a web address, and somebody reading my document would actually have this link through to the Empire review. Now, of course, I could do the same thing with Zero Dark Thirty or, of course, I could perhaps try to do a link for Zero Dark Thirty through to a trailer.

Now one of the other new features in Word 2013 is the ability to insert links to online video. And also on the Insert tab is this one, Online Video. If I click on Online Video, it brings up a dialog. It usually takes a little bit of time to get started but it gives me two options. One of them is to do a video search and another one is to use a video embed code. Now you may or may not be familiar with video embed codes. It’s the sort of thing you can get for YouTube videos and so on, where you can embed a link into a link in a Word document. But let’s try the Bing video search option. Let’s see if we can find anything about Zero Dark Thirty. And we certainly have several things about Zero Dark Thirty. The first one we’ve got here. If you look at the little commentary which appears in the bottom left of the dialog here, the first one is the movie review, then we’ve got the Academy conversations, cast interviews, there’s a trailer. Let’s try the trailer. Let’s insert that. And that puts a link into our document. Now not only has it put a link in but it puts in a play control and then you can actually click to play that trailer.

Now this link is going to be available to you. So I give you the opportunity to play this trailer yourself. But I’m now going to give you the last big exercise to do in this course. And that is you may have noticed that I said at the top there My Top 10, so there’s a bit of a hint. Five is enough actually. If you’ve only got five movies, maybe the same five as me, maybe you’re using this list, five is enough. But go for ten if you can. But what I’d like you to do is to produce your own version of example-18 with links from the entries in the table to sections of the document, one per movie. And within a section of a document, put a link to a review or a link to a cast list or something else and in at least case put a link to an online video, maybe a review or an interview, something about that movie. My answer to that will be example-18. By all means feel free to make yours a little bit more elaborate and extensive than mine and try to vary the types of hyperlink that you use.

That’s it on this section. I’ll see you in the next one.

Simon Calder

Chris “Simon” Calder was working as a Project Manager in IT for one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious cultural institutions, LACMA.He taught himself to use Microsoft Project from a giant textbook and hated every moment of it. Online learning was in its infancy then, but he spotted an opportunity and made an online MS Project course - the rest, as they say, is history!