How to make hyperlinks work in pdf from word

Converting Word to PDF with hyperlinks is not a Rocket Science these days. Sometimes, doing it properly retaining hyperlinks is a bit tricky.

A common and an easy method to convert Microsoft Word doc to PDF with hyperlinks is to use a built-in option available in Microsoft Word as “Save as PDF“. This plugin is available in Ms Office 2010 and later versions.

Other methods can be used with third party PDFs converter. There are many free Word to PDF converters available such as: CutePDF and SodaPDF. We will see the built-in option available in Ms Word 🙂 We will also read about manually creating hyperlinks directly in PDFs. One more method is mentioned below for auto-detecting the URLs in the PDFs.

Convert Word to PDF with built-in “Save as PDF”

If you are using Ms Word 2010 and later versions then first make sure these things:

• Always try to use Ms Word’s built-in styles for body text, headings and lists etc., as much as you can, by doing so you will have much more control over formatting and accessibility of the text when using built-in styles in Ms Word.
• Write your links with absolute URLs, such as https://usedtotech.com/templates/ instead of masking them under names, like Templates. Both are the same URLs but written differently. Write absolute URLs as much as you can in your Word doc.

When you are ready to convert your Word doc to PDF then simply go to the File > Save as > Select a PDF file type from Save as Type and then press Enter to save your Word doc as PDF. Leave other settings default. Or simply press a function key F12 (on PC) to open “Save as” dialog box in Microsoft Word.

And you are done, open the newly created PDF, all hyperlinks should be working fine in the PDF.

Microsoft Word’s built-in styles and Save as PDF plugin together do their job perfectly by making an accessible PDF, i.e., a PDF with hyperlinks or clickable links. Majority of third party pdf converters do not take care of accessibility tags when making PDFs, this can be a result of non-working links in PDFs.

Manually creating hyperlinks in PDF

If you don’t have the source document in Word format, you can still create hyperlinks directly in the PDF. We are using Adobe Acrobat here.

Open your PDF in Acrobat. Click at the Tools menu at the top right. Expand the Content Editing tab and select Add or Edit Link. Make a selection over the text you want to convert into hyperlink.

A new dialog box will open. Make settings as indicated in the image below. Then click Next.

Then enter the URL in the next dialog box and click OK.

And your text is hyperlinked now. This is a manual method of creating links in the PDFs. This will be a time-taking process as you will have to repeat these steps for each text you need to convert into hyperlinks.

Auto-detecting URLs in PDF and converting them into links

Adobe Acrobat is really a useful software. It can help you in detecting and creating links automatically in your PDF. The process is simple. Read below.

Open your PDF in Acrobat. Click at the Tools menu. Expand the Document Processing tab and then click on Create Links from URLs. Read the warning and proceed by clicking on the Yes button.

Select the page range in the next dialog box and click OK.

And you are done with this method. Acrobat will detect and convert URLs into links in your PDF. But this method is not always the BEST one to convert the URLs accurately. So make sure everything is inline with your requirements by manually checking the links.

Hope you like this post 🙂 Don’t also forget to share your valuable thoughts in the comments box.

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