Hyperlinks aide navigation

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): Up until two decades ago, when people still used a Royal or Olympia typewriter to produce stories, manuscripts and novels, we had to work mostly in a linear manner. We would start at the beginning and work our way to the end.

Life was made a little bit easier when photocopy machines were introduced. Each time some text had to be inserted into what we had laboriously typed in, scissors and glue proved to be indispensable tools. We applied the concept of "cut and paste" in the real sense.

However, since PCs and Macs replaced the typewriter, a lot of things have changed. We no longer have to follow such a strictly linear process in writing. We can now simply jump from one part of our writing to another and add, delete or change words as we wish.

And the Web intensifies our habit of jumping around. Open a Web page, read the text, and when you see a link, which is normally in underlined blue characters, you can click on it and jump to another part of the page where you can read more detailed information or supporting data. The link can also take you to a different Web page, call up your default e-mail client software and prepare an e-mail to the address that it contains, or even load a multimedia file and play it for you.

I remember back in late 1980s when hyperlink capability was a truly stunning technological breakthrough among us graduate students at the Communication and Information Program of the University of Hawaii. Today, it is taken for granted. Even a simple document created in Microsoft Word can be sprinkled with hyperlinks to make it much easier for the reader to read it nonsequentially from one part to another, or for the writer to revise different parts of his writing as he finds new data.

Navigation Tools

The hyperlink is definitely not the only tool that we can use to make navigating in a long document easy. If you organize your document with headings and subheadings, you can call up Document Map and use it to move from one section to another. In Word, click on the View menu, and then on Document Map. Or, if you used the Outline view mode when you started writing, you can also use it to move around easily.

However, as you may have become accustomed to moving around in Web pages using hyperlinks or if you regularly work on documents to be posted on the Web, you might as well learn to incorporate this easy-to-use navigation tool in your document.

When writing this article, I happened to be preparing a rather long article with a lot of headings and subheadings for the introductory chapter to my team's report of our research on e- commerce in ASEAN. We can use it as an example to show how hyperlinks can be created.

First of all, I made the report outline in the ordinary way instead of using the Outline mode available in Word. I typed in the title of the chapter and then added the first level of subheadings. As I thought of the issues in each section that would require their own subheadings, I added them to my outline. Once the outline looked complete enough and the sequence of issues made sense to me, I copied it and pasted at the end of the document. I left the original outline on top as the map for the entire chapter, and its copy below as the skeleton to which I could add the flesh.

Add Bookmarks First

To be able to immediately jump from the outline -- or the map -- to a subheading, we have to "bookmark" the destination first. This is a straightforward task. Just scroll down to the target subheading, highlight the entire name, and then click on Insert, Bookmark. We then get the Bookmark dialog box, as shown in the accompanying picture. We can add, delete or go to any bookmark in the document with the help of this dialog box. To add a bookmark, we also have to give it a name. You can give a name consisting of several words, but you cannot use a space, a quotation mark or any other writing mechanics in the name. You can separate the words using underscore marks, though. So, for example, I named one of my bookmarks "Displacement_of_Workers", and it marks the subheading "Displacement of Workers". Before you close the dialog box, select Location so that the bookmarks will be sorted according to their locations in the document.

Once all the subheadings in the body of the document are bookmarked, we can proceed and create the hyperlinks. We go back to the top by simply pressing Ctrl-Home. To change a subheading in the outline into a hyperlink, what we need to do is select the entire text and press Ctrl-K. This key combination calls up the Hyperlink dialog box, which you can also see in the picture. Click on the Places in this document icon on the left tool bar, and then click on Bookmarks in the center box so that you can see a list of all bookmarks that you have added to the document. Click on the one that you want the hyperlink to jump to, and then click OK.

So, for example, if I changed my outline subheading "E-mail, a Killer Application" into a hyperlink to the same subheading in the body of my document, each time I click on it I will jump to the subheading of my section that explains why e-mail was the application that gave people a truly compelling reason to want to be able to use the Internet.

There are a couple of other things that you can do with a hyperlink. You can create one that will open a Word document or an HTML file stored in your computer, in a Website, etc. Press Ctrl-K again, and now click on the Existing File or Web Page icon, then on the Recent Files icon next to it, and you will get a list of the files that you have used recently. You can even use the Browse facility to find a file or a Web page that is not listed there.

Just for fun, try to find an audio file from your C:WINDOWSMEDIA folder, and create a hyperlink for this file. Click on it and see what happens. Remember that it is also not necessary for you to have the text before you can create a hyperlink. Place the cursor on a blank line, and then press Ctrl- K again. After you have specified where you want the hyperlink to take you, go to the Text to display box on top of the dialog box and type in the name for the hyperlink there. You can even specify what the Tip box will show when the mouse cursor is placed on the hyperlink.

Bookmarks and hyperlinks are really worth spending some time exploring. (zatni@cbn.net.id)