Links in emails

OK, Joe in sales has just sent you and 16 others in your department yet another 13 MB PowerPoint presentation for everyone to review. And to make things worse, you now keep getting those annoying "your mailbox is over quota" messages from IT. Just another day in the office?

Well, you know that the best way to share documents is to use a link to a shared drive where people can review or modify the documents, but getting those pesky hyperlinks in to your email document just seems like more trouble than it is worth. Easy to see why Joe likes to email the whole presentation every time. On a side note, you can of course use the Microsoft Office feature called document reviewing, but that would just ruin the whole point of my story :-)

So let's assume that you want to to share a document named CoolPres.ppt that lives on the public Z: network drive in your company and that it has a path of "Z:\Sales\Firm A". If you use MS Word as your email editor, then there are 3 ways of getting a link to the presentation included in your email.

1. Use AutoCorrect. Set up an AutoCorrect entry for the Z: drive, so each time you type in Z: it expands to \\myserver\myshare (or whatever your server + share is called). See previous blog entry on how to do this. This is useful if you often refer to the very same network share. However, it is a little more work if the path you want to share has a space in it. To create a link simply type in the link, but as soon as you hit a space, Word will create a hyperlink. Since our example has a space in "Firm A" press undo right after the hyperlink is created and keep typing the rest. Then put quotes around the whole thing, and go to the end of it and press space. In the end, your link will look something like this: \\myserver\myshare\Sales\Firm A\CoolPres.ppt

Yes, as I said AutoCorrect is useful for creating the same link all the time, not so much for typical linking.

2. Use the file:\\ prefix. Simply type in "file:\\" in front of the path to the file. Note that sometimes you will need to put double quotes around the whole string when you have spaces in your file name or path name. So type the following: file:\\Z:\Sales\Firm A\CoolPres.ppt . As you finish typing the file name, Word will automatically turn your string into a hyperlink.

3. Use MS Word hyperlinking. However, the simplest way create a hyperlink to a file in an email, is to use the built-in Word hyperlink feature. Simply press Ctrl-K to get the hyperlink pop-up, locate your document, e.g. Z:\Sales\Firm A\CoolPres.ppt, and press enter. Done.

Please note that the email recipients do not need to have the Z: drive mapped to the same place as you in any of the cases above. The hyperlink you create is actually not to the Z: drive itself, but to the mapped resource (e.g. \\myserver\myshare) instead. You can see this if you mouse over the link you created. However, the email recipients do of course need permissions to read the folder where the shared document lives.

Nifty.