Automatically turn specific words into hyperlinks
In my emails, I often need to refer to documentation and products on the Internet for which I also supply the URL within the message.
For readability, I turn these words into clickable hyperlinks.
Unfortunately, this is quite a bit of work and the documentation and product links are the same ones I use over and over.
Would it be possible to automatically turn these key words into hyperlinks pointing to the correct URL?
This is can be achieved quite easily by using the good old AutoCorrect feature.
- Create a new message in Outlook (keyboard shortcut CTRL+N).
- Type the word or word group that you want to to create an automatic hyperlink for. For example: Calendar Printing Assistant
- Select the word or word group and create the hyperlink as you would normally do. The keyboard shortcut to bring up the Insert Hyperlink dialog after you have selected some text is CTRL+K.
- Select the now hyperlinked word or word group. Make sure you don’t select a trailing space.
- Open the Spelling and AutoCorrect… dialog
- Outlook 2003 with Word as the email editor
Tools-> AutoCorrect Options… - Outlook 2007
Office button (top left or press ALT+F)-> button: Editor Options-> section: Proofing-> button: AutoCorrect Options… - Outlook 2010, Outlook 2013 and Outlook 2016
File-> Options-> section: Mail-> button: Spelling and Autocorrect-> AutoCorrect Options…
- Outlook 2003 with Word as the email editor
- Specify the text that it should replace. In our example, this could be “Calendar Printing Assistant” but also something shorter such as “CPA”.
- Verify that the option “Formatted text” is selected or otherwise the hyperlink will be lost.
- Press OK until all open dialogs are closed.
Use AutoCorrect to automatically hyperlink commonly used references.
(click on image for the full dialog)
The next time that you type your specified text, Outlook will automatically hyperlink this word or word group for you.
Note: When you are replying to a Plain Text email, the automatic linking will not work since Plain Text doesn’t support hyperlinking words.
