Thank you for being a valued part of the CNET community. As of December 1, 2020, the forums are in read-only format. In early 2021, CNET Forums will no longer be available. We are grateful for the participation and advice you have provided to one another over the years.

Thanks,

CNET Support

General discussion

Pasting Links into Word

Aug 27, 2010 2:41AM PDT

OK so I use old Word 97. WinXP sp2. I'm very active in a forum and have a doc to copy my answers from. Now if I want to copy TO my doc how come I can't paste a url from within a text body? Like if I want to copy another forum post to my document the url won't paste as a link.

I have to actually open the web page and copy from the address line for it to work in my document. Hope you followed that.

Discussion is locked

- Collapse -
Strange, I used to be able to do that.
Aug 27, 2010 7:00AM PDT

I don't use Office now but I'm sure I used to be able to do that, even in Word 97.

Right click the link, select "Copy link location", then paste that into the Word document.

I can't remember if I then had to do any formatting of the link, (Format menu), or if it was CTRL + Click to activate straight away, but it worked for me.

What happens when you try that?

Mark

- Collapse -
Don't have that choice
Aug 27, 2010 7:41AM PDT

I don't have copy link location. I'm using IE7. But when I right click all the copy choices are dimmed and unselectable. I tried Save target as but that wants to d/l to my computer. I tried Copy Shortcut but that pasted a link to the current web page I was on and not the link in it that I want to copy.

- Collapse -
IE7
Aug 27, 2010 9:44PM PDT

Well I've just tested my IE8, basically the same as IE7 as far as links are concerned, and right clicked, select Copy Shortcut, and pasted the link into Notepad, (as a test), and it worked fine.

A work around is to right click the link, select Properties, and in the Properties dialog window, highlight the URL, right click and select Copy from there.

Have you tried this on any other web site? Some sites don't allow direct copying for security reasons. For example, if you have a Google listing page open and try to copy a link direct from that page, you do not get the link you expect. This is Google's way of avoiding false re-directs. You either have to click the link, or right click and select "New tab/window".

Also, you say you are active in forums and it is forum posts you want to copy links to. I can't say about the forum you visit, but these forums have a "Permalink" link at the bottom of each post. Right click that, select Copy Shortcut, and that should work.

Does that help?

Mark

- Collapse -
Pasting link into Word....
Aug 28, 2010 10:11PM PDT

Are you able to create a hyperlink by typing in a URL or web address, then hit the space bar ? Word does not always create the hyperlink automatically when you pasted a hyperlink. Very often, you need to place the insert cursor at the end of the pasted link and "manually" create it by hitting the space bar.