Check All Hyperlinks in a MS Word Document in Seconds

In writing a long term paper, company manual, or other long document in Word, it is almost impossible to avoid inserting hyperlinks. Hyperlinks to relevant Web pages can make a document’s content more powerful.

The problem is, the longer the document, the harder it is to do a final check of each hyperlink before submitting a document to the powers-that-be. A dead link can be a major embarrassment!

Luckily, there is a Word add-in that can pull all of the hyperlinks out of Word document and check them all at once, no matter how many links there are or how long the document is. It is called, ironically enough, Hyperlink Checker for Word.


Once installed, Hyperlink Checker for Word appears in the Word tool bar beside the Add-ins tab in a new tab for AbleBits.com, the add-in’s creator.

After clicking the tab, click the icon on the right for Hyperlink Checker for Word.

The add-in then checks all of the links in your document, with question marks next to the links that may be mislabeled or dead.

To see only the links that may have problems, click the Suspicious button.

Hyperlinks labeled as suspicious will have a note from the add-in attached to them that you can see by clicking on the name of the link. The note appears at the bottom of the window.

If you only want to see hyperlinks in a certain page range, you can specify that. You can also select text in the document, and have Hyperlink Checker scan just that area.

So, checking hyperlinks does not need to be an all-day task. Hyperlink Checker can narrow down links that need your immediate attention in seconds, shaving hours of scrolling for links in really long documents.

Hyperlink Checker for word is available from AbleBits.com.

How to Use Word 2010 Remove Background Tool

By: Muhammad Iqbal Akhtar.

One of the lesser known new features that Microsoft added to Word in its 2010 release is something called the Remove Background Tool. In short, it’s a photo editing tool that replicates one of the features of high end applications such as Photoshop.

The Remove Background Tool does just what its name implies; it removes some or all of the background from images; something you might find comes in handy when placing photographs into Word documents.

First of all pull the image into Word by first clicking on the Insert option on the main Ribbon, then by clicking on the Picture icon, and then using the file manager to locate and retrieve your image. Below is a test example.

Next, if the Picture Tools menu is not showing, click once on your photograph to bring it up. It should look like this:

Notice on the far left side of the Picture Tools menu bar where it says Remove Background:

With the image still highlighted, click on the Remove Background icon, it should cause something like this:

Some of the background has changed color and a box was drawn, hopefully, around the main image in the picture.

At this point, you can accept what Word has automatically done for you by clicking on the Keep Changes icon,:

The result should look something like this:

If on the other hand, you find that the box that was drawn didn’t quite cover the area you were hoping for you can change its size by grabbing the handles on the sides and corners and dragging them to where you want them to be; then if you are happy with what you’ve got, click the Keep Changes icon.

Or if you’re still not happy with what Word has done to identify the part of the background you wish to have removed, you can use the Mark Areas to Keep orMark Ares to Remove icons.

The Mark Areas to Keep icon allows you to draw straight lines using your mouse that will undue some of the background removal that was done automatically by Word. To see how it works, click on the Mark Areas to Keep icon, then move your mouse over the image.

Then click and hold down the left mouse button while moving to another place over the image; a dashed line should appear showing you the line that is being drawn. Then, let go of the mouse button. You should see something like this:

In the example, the red color came from the original background that was removed automatically; it was restored by using the Mark Areas to Keep icon.

To see how the Mark Areas to Remove icon works, once again click on it, than move your mouse to a place over the image, then once again hold the mouse button down as you draw a dashed line from one point in the picture to another. When you let go of the mouse button, you should get something that looks like this:

The addition of more purple means more of the image was removed.

After clicking Keep Changes, it looks like this:

Clearly adding and removing parts of your image using these two icons is an inexact science to say the least. The best approach is to use trial and error as you gradually come to see how the two icons “think.”

Also, you can draw multiple lines; adding and removing till you think you have what you want; and along the way, you can use the Delete Mark icon to get rid of any of the lines you’ve drawn.

Just hit the Delete Mark icon and then double click on any line you don’t like and it will disappear.

Or get rid of all the lines at once by clicking on the Discard All Changes icon:

When you’re happy with your work, click the Keep Changes icon to save what you’ve done.

Finally, remember that the finished product is still an image, and therefore all of the other new photo editing features in Word 2010 can be used once you’ve removed the background, which means you might wind up with something that look like this:

Microsoft has clearly taken some giant steps with the addition of features such as the Remove Background tool, and now users who take advantage of them can make truly professional looking documents without having to resort to other applications for touching up photographs and other graphics.

How to Use Word 2010′s New Paste Feature

One of the most common things computer user’s do is cut, copy and paste stuff. When you’re cutting or copying from one place in a document to another, there’s not much to the story; when you’re cutting or copying text from a website perhaps, to a Word document on the other hand, things get a bit stickier, because sometimes you do want the copied text to look as it did on the website, and sometimes, you just want it to fit in seamlessly with what you’re already writing.

Microsoft has not been blind to this and did give us some options for cutting, copying and pasting in Word 2007 with the Paste button on the main ribbon. Recognizing that what they’d done so far wasn’t enough, Microsoft went a step further with Word 2010 by giving users a much better preview of what they’ll get when choosing a particular option.


Word 2010’s new Paste feature can be accessed two different ways; the first is by clicking the right mouse button in the spot where you want to paste something.
note: you’ll only get all the paste options shown if you have previously highlighted and copied some text from another source that has non-standard text in it.

The other way is by clicking on the Paste icon on the main ribbon:

note: in order to get all of the icons to show up in the drop down menu, you first have to copy some non-standard text from another source.

Note the Set Default Paste option that has been added to the bottom of the drop down menu:

Clicking on it brings up a window for setting the defaults for a myriad of Word options:

We only need to look at the defaults for Cut, copy and paste:

Setting defaults for when you paste something, is actually a bigger deal than it might seem. Say for example you have grown used to using Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V for copying and pasting stuff from websites into your Word documents; normally the default is to paste what has been copied in its natural state, i.e. with all the web formatting in place.

If you change the default for Pasting between documents to Keep Text Only, you can save yourself the extra step of having to strip out the formatting manually.

At any rate, once you’ve got your defaults set the way you want, using the Pastefeature works the same regardless of which way you access it. To use it, first copy some formatted text and/or graphics from a web site:

Next, open or resume working on a document in Word, then pick a spot in your document to paste the stuff you copied by clicking in the document; then, click the Paste icon. You should notice right away that things look different; instead of word choices, there are now icons.

To see how these icons work, slide your mouse slowly over the different options. Moving from left to right the icons represent: Keep Source Formatting, Merge Formatting,and Keep Text Only. You should be able to see what the pasted material will look like in your document as you move your cursor over the three icons.

Keep Source Formatting:

Merge Formatting:

And finally, Keep Text Only:

To actually paste in the copied material, click on the one you want and the copied material will be pasted into your document in the format you chose (in this case, Keep Source Formatting).

The new icon based Paste tool with preview should make cutting, copying and pasting a much easier task for anyone that does a lot of moving text around from different applications into Word.