Hyperlinking to External Files

[Guest]

Greetings. I have Excel 2007 and Windows XP. I am using a worksheet in Excel
as a hyperlink storage bin (containing links to external files). I realize
there are many other programs that might be more suitable for this purpose,
but I'd rather keep all these file links in Excel (conveniently with all my
other other stuff). I'd rather not use OneNote (or AskSam, UltraRecall,
ConectedText, etc.), though they could do the job I'm sure.

In certain cells I have as I said above hyperlinks that link to many
(relatively small) external files (including pdfs). When I click on the
hyperlink in an Excel cell the file opens (pdfs open very slowly, as you
know). If the links are to files from MS Word 2007, these files take far too
long to open. I was wondering if the experts out there could give me the
names of programs that could open linked files (containing rft material and
various content copied from the web) very quickly when clicked from within
Excel? I keep all these various files in one folder. I hope this question
doesn't appear to simple-minded.

Regards, Rebecca

 

[Guest]

Greetings. I have Excel 2007 and Windows XP. I am using a worksheet in Excel
as a hyperlink storage bin (containing links to external files). I realize
there are many other programs that might be more suitable for this purpose,
but I'd rather keep all these file links in Excel (conveniently with all my
other other stuff). I'd rather not use OneNote (or AskSam, UltraRecall,
ConectedText, etc.), though they could do the job I'm sure.

In certain cells I have as I said above hyperlinks that link to many
(relatively small) external files (including pdfs). When I click on the
hyperlink in an Excel cell the file opens (pdfs open very slowly, as you
know). If the links are to files from MS Word 2007, these files take far too
long to open. I was wondering if the experts out there could give me the
names of programs that could open linked files (containing rft material and
various content copied from the web) very quickly when clicked from within
Excel? I keep all these various files in one folder. I hope this question
doesn't appear to simple-minded.

Regards, Rebecca

 

[Guest]

(arrrgggghhhhh - this is my 3rd attempt in as many days to respond to your
question - the system seems bound and determined not to let me).

First - the question is not simple-minded, it is a honest request for some
insight as to how things work and how you might get them to work better.

Bottom line - you're probably not going to easily get an improvement in
performance in opening hyperlinked files. I'll try to explain in basic terms
what has to happen to get a hyperlinked file open and we'll explore where the
bottlenecks could be in doing so.

You click a hyperlink and the system has to figure out where the file is,
what type of file it is and what program should be used to open it. Then
that other program has to be started and the file to be opened has to be
passed to it as the one to open.

Each file type (.rtf, .doc, .xls, .jpg, .pdf, etc) has a specific file
associated with it to be used to open and work with them. Typically in a
system with Office on it, Word is used for both .rtf and .doc files, Excel
for .xls files; while various graphic files will be opened with some graphic
viewer/editor, and .pdf files are normally opened with either Adobe Acrobat
or Adobe Acrobat Reader. If you could find files that both opened faster and
opened the file to be viewed faster you'd have to change the file
associations and then you run into the problem of what to do when your really
want to edit/work with the type of file in question.

Next, how fast a program opens depends a lot on the program itself, the
computer it is running on (CPU speed, memory installed, disk space available,
location of the program [local or remote], etc) and where the file to be
opened is located, its size and the speed of data transfer if it is on a
network or the internet. Any one of these factors can cause a bottleneck of
varying size.

In general, I've had a definite perception that Office 2007 programs open
slower than earlier versions. This is true of Word, Excel and Outlook which
are the 3 2007 applications I use the most. You can try to determine how
much overhead is being created when opening a file via a hyperlink by making
timing tests of opening the file via hyperlink and when opening it by
locating the file and double-clicking on it.

Try timing the opening of several different type files via hyperlink from
Excel. Then I would reset the computer to clear any files that might be
cached locally and then try timing the opening of the same files by locating
them in Windows Explorer or your web browser and double-clicking them to open
them. If many are on the internet, I'd run several tests to get an average
time. The difference in time is the overhead being added by opening them via
hyperlink within Excel.