Replacing Plain Text with a Hyperlink

Ron wonders if there is a way for the Find and Replace feature to replace plain text with an active hyperlink. The answer depends on the type of replacement you want to do.

If you want to replace all occurrences of a text string with a hyperlink, then the task is relatively easy. For instance, you might want to replace all instances of a company's name with a "hyperlinked" version of the company name. You can do that by following these steps:

1. Create a hyperlink that represents what you want to use in place of the existing company names.
2. Select the hyperlink and press Ctrl+C. This copies the hyperlink to the Clipboard.
3. Press Ctrl+H to display the Replace tab of the Find and Replace dialog box. (See Figure 1.)



Figure 1. The Replace tab of the Find and Replace dialog box.

4. In the Find What box, enter the company name you want to replace.
5. In the Replace With box, enter ^c.
6. Click Replace All.

Each occurrence of the company name should now be replaced with the active hyperlink. The ^c characters in step 5 are the key here; they replace whatever you specify in step 4 with the contents of the Clipboard (which contains your hyperlink).

If your needs call for using Find and Replace to convert plain text hyperlinks (such as http://www.tips.net) into active hyperlinks, then this cannot be done. Instead, you'll need to either use Find and Replace (as described above) to do a separate operation on each hyperlink, or you'll need to simply place the insertion point after each hyperlink and press the Space Bar.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (8690) applies to Microsoft Word 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. You can find a version of this tip for the ribbon interface of Word (Word 2007 and later) here: Replacing Plain Text with a Hyperlink.