Controlling the Program Used with Hyperlinked Images

Subscriber Jim Cobb wrote about a problem he was having with Word and hyperlinks to various JPG and TIF images. When he clicked on the hyperlinks, the images wouldn't open in the viewer that he normally used to view those types of images. What Jim is looking for is a way to configure Word so that when he clicked on a hyperlink, the image opened in ACDSee 5.0.

The answer is that this is not a Word issue, but is instead a Windows issue. When you click on a hyperlink to an image, Word passes the request to Windows, which checks to see the name of the program associated with the type of file pointed to by the link. Whatever program is associated with JPG files will be used to view the JPG images, and whatever program is associated with TIF files will be used to view them.

The answer, then, is to get out of Windows and modify the file associations used by Windows. Fortunately, ACDSee makes this easy to do. Just follow these steps:

1. Start ACDSee.
2. Choose File Associations from the Tools menu.
3. Select the files you want associated with ACDSee.
4. Click OK.

That's it. You can restart Word and the hyperlinks should call up ACDSee to view the file types you specified in step 3. If you prefer, however, you can change the file associations directly within Windows. The exact steps you follow depend on the version of Windows you are using. The following steps work on Windows 2000, but you can adapt them for your own version of Windows:

1. In My Computer or Windows Explorer, click Folder Options from the Tools menu. Windows displays the Folder Options dialog box.
2. Click the File Types tab. (Click here to see a related figure.)
3. In the list of file types, click one you want to change.
4. Click Change. Windows displays the Open With dialog box.
5. Find the name of the program you want to use to open this particular type of file.
6. Click on OK.
7. Repeat steps 3 through 6, as desired.
8. Click on OK to close the Folder Options dialog box.