How Do I Do That? Make a Word a Hyperlink

These days it's hard to find an email or document without a mention of a web address. There are three ways to do this in ascending order of your proficiency.

1. Just type the name of the website, as in Yahoo.com. It's not a clickable link, but at least you've told people where to go.
2. Type the URL prefaced by a www. or http:// (There are some differences in these two: www. refers to the webservice of domain and http:// is a protocol used by the Internet). So for example, if I type www.tech.yahoo.com, you can click on it. This is really helpful for people reading your work at their computer because it leads them to the website you're discussing.
3. The most literate way to reference a website (especially for online reading) is not to display some cryptic URL in your text but to make a word or phase a hyperlink. So, for example, if I type "read about Robin on her blog" I can take those words and highlight them with my mouse. In Microsoft Word, I can click on the hyperlink icon (a round blue sphere with the link symbol) and my phrase read about Robin becomes a link to the Yahoo! bloggers.

You can create hyperlinks to:

• Documents and files;
• Web pages;
• Email addresses; and
• Specific locations in documents you link to.

The choices on the Word "insert hyperlink" menu seem a bit overwhelming at first. But if you look at the screen shot, all I did was type "Robin's blog" where it asks me to type the text and then enter the URL where it asks for the address. Viewers will see a link like this one Robin's blog that's clickable but doesn't muck up the flow of the document with an ugly URL.