Hyperlink character limit

[Guest]

I am trying to add a hyperlink to my Word document that is very long (500+
characters). The link won't work because Word cuts off the URL. Is there a
limit to the number of characters that Word will accept for a hyperlink?

 

[Anne Troy]

Word doesn't seem to have a problem with up to 800 characters during my
test. Likely, you've got spaces in your hyperlink, which aren't desirable
anyway, and which must be written as %20.
************
Hope it helps!
Anne Troy
www.OfficeArticles.com

 

[Guest]

No spaces. What's really strange is that I've found I can assign the long
hyperlink to an image, but not text. I've even gone as far as trying to
hand-type the link and at a certain point it won't let me type anymore
characters.

 

[Anne Troy]

All I can do is offer to test it here. Can you give us the hyperlink exactly
as you're using it?
************
Hope it helps!
Anne Troy
www.OfficeArticles.com

 

[Guest]

Well, I can give it to you, but it's a link to within my company's intranet,
so it won't work no matter what. Perhaps you can at least see if it's
cutting off the URL for you as it is me. I've found that when I paste it in,
I only get the first 256 characters.

Ready? Here it is:
http://idoc6/content6/idcplg?IdcSer...++<AND>++xTopicCateg+<matches>+`News+Letter`)

 

[Jay Freedman]

If you're typing or pasting the URL into the Create Hyperlink dialog,
the problem is that the Address text box in that dialog has a
256-character limit.

Instead, just paste the URL into the body of the document and press
the spacebar or Enter key. Assuming you have checked "Internet and
network paths with hyperlinks" in the Tools > AutoCorrect Options >
AutoFormat As You Type dialog, the autoformat will change the URL into
a hyperlink. After that, if you need to change something, you can
right-click the link and choose Edit Hyperlink and the dialog will
maintain the full URL.

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the
newsgroup so all may benefit.

 

[Guest]

Well... we're getting closer. I tried this work-around; I pasted the url
into the document, pressed the space bar and the URL become hot. I then
changed the text to say what I wanted, and as you said, the text continued to
be hot. However, the URL was again shortened, this time to 516 characters.
Unfortunately, my URL is 537 characters. I'm starting to think that Word
will now allow this.

The funny thing is, Word did allow me to assign the 537 character URL to a
picture within my document. Isn't that strange?

Thanks for your help.

 

[Tony Jollans]

It isn't easy to see exactly what the dialog does but you can try this.

Press Ctrl+K (or otherwise invoke the hyperlink dialog)
Enter the text you want to display in the "text to display" box.
Enter any random text in the address box - say the single character "a".
Press OK

Press Alt+F9 to reveal field codes
The hyperlink will show as { HYPERLINK "a" } (where "a" is the random text
you entered)
Type or cut and paste or whatever the full address between the quotes
instead of the "a".
Press Alt+F9 to hide field codes again.

When I did this with the link you posted I had to do Paste Special >
Unformatted Text to stop getting a nested hyperlink field - you may or may
not need to do this depending on what you cut and paste - but apart from
that it (seems to) work.

 

[Bob S]

I am trying to add a hyperlink to my Word document that is very long (500+
characters). The link won't work because Word cuts off the URL. Is there a
limit to the number of characters that Word will accept for a hyperlink?

You may be able to evade the truncation if you have visited the page
or opened the file recently; just use the "Browsed Pages" button in
the dialog to get a list to choose from.

Let us know whether it works.

Bob S

 

[Felicity Chapman]

Thank you to everyone on this thread. I just got caught out with long hyperlinks in Word 2012. It's really bizarre when your long URL is simply replaced by Chinese characters!

Since it was in a business-critical document that I had to complete asap before a meeting, I was horrified. Fortunately I found this thread fairly quickly and it contained exactly the information that I needed to be able to workaround this bug in Word.

So I've joined the forum so that I can thank you for taking the time to write about problems and workarounds.