When Tom hyperlinks from one Word document to another, he would like the previous document to close automatically. He notes that if he has several documents hyperlinking to several others, he can end up with quite a few Word documents open at the same time.
Believe it or not, this behavior is built into Word. Well, it has been built into Word since the advent of Word 2000. In Word 97, hyperlinks to new documents worked very similar to the way that Tom describes—the destination document would open in the same window that the source document previously occupied.
This change was a result of a user interface change implemented by Microsoft in Word 2000. You can read more about this behavior change here:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/224717
Thus, the behavior of current versions of Word relative to hyperlinks and new windows cannot be changed. You could, however, bypass hyperlinks all together and create some sort of macro or macro button to open the new document and close the old one. The ways in which you would implement such a workaround will depend on the names and locations of the documents you want to access.
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