Removing autoformatted hyperlinks

There is nothing more irritating than receiving a manuscript to edit which is full of hyperlinks that Word has automatically formatted for your 'convenience'. Luckily, there is a way to get rid of all the hyperlinks in a document with just the click of a button or keyboard command.

For this to work, you will have to create a macro. But don't worry, if you've never created a macro before, the following steps should guide you through the process.

1. From the Tools menu, choose Macro > Macros...
2. In the dialogue box that comes up, type in a name for your new macro (e.g. 'RemoveHyperlinks'). Note that the name cannot have spaces in it. Then click on Create.
3. The program will take you into a new screen which may be virtually empty, or which may have a long list of what looks like coding in it. In any case, the last piece of text you will see will look something like this:
   
Sub RemoveHyperlinks()
'
' Test Macro
' Macro created 13/5/04 by Hui-chang Wang
'
End Sub
(note that this Sub has been given the name that you used in step 2 - in this case, 'RemoveHyperlinks')
4. In the space before the line 'End Sub', insert text so that the whole thing looks like the following (make sure you copy this exactly - you can try copying and pasting the text from here):

Sub RemoveHyperlinks()
'
' Test Macro
' Macro created 13/5/04 by Hui-chang Wang
'
While ActiveDocument.Hyperlinks.Count > 0
ActiveDocument.Hyperlinks(1).Delete
Wend
Application.Options.AutoFormatAsYouTypeReplaceHyperlinks = False
End Sub
(thanks to WordTips Online http://wtonline.vitalnews.com/ for this bit of coding!)
5. Then choose Close and Return to Microsoft Word from the Word menu (or the File menu if you are using Windows or Mac OS 9 or earlier). You will be returned to Word.
6. It is time now to add your macro to the toolbar and/or create a keyboard shortcut for it. From the Tools menu, select Customize...
7. Under the Commands tab, scroll down the menu on the left-hand side of the dialogue box and choose the Macros category. You will then see all your macros appear on the right-hand side of the dialogue box. From here, you can click on the macro you just created and drag it to your toolbar to make a new button.



8. Sadly, Word automatically gives your macro a long, unwieldy name and so your button will be called this name too. To rename the button you have just created, right-click or Ctrl-click on the button and choose Properties... from the contextual menu that pops up. The dialogue box which appears will allow you to rename the button to something short and meaningful.



9. To create a keyboard shortcut to the command, in the same Properties... dialogue box, click on the Keyboard... button and assign a new keyboard shortcut, preferably one that hasn't been used before, e.g. Ctrl+H or Alt+H.



10. Now, whenever you get a document full of hyperlinks, just click on your toolbar button or use your keyboard shortcut to remove them all instantly!

Note: Occassionally, especially if you are reading a cross-platform Word document, this macro doesn't work on some of the hyperlinks - this seems to occur randomly but may be because of the way the original hyperlink was set up. The macro will churn through all the hyperlinks until it hits one that doesn't work and then spit out an error message. If this happens to you, you can try to identify which hyperlink didn't work, manually fix that one, and then run the macro again. If there aren't any other faulty hyperlinks, the macro should then continue to remove the remaining hyperlinks.