Breaking Word hyperlinks

[m_s]

I have a w-a-a-a-a-a-a-y complicated Word document, written collaboratively by a number of authors.  There are about 300 associated documents, each linked to from within the main document.  We're hitting problems with the links breaking, since the folder of document plus supporting material is on a USB drive, and that drive is getting a different drive-letter on different systems, but the links are not dynamically updating to the correct drive letter. 

Except: they do dynamically update when I don't want them to.  I know that a link pointed just to the title of the associated document will try to open the document from the same folder that the master document is in.  This works, but if we test it, Word then helpfully (?) adds in the drive and folder, which of course is wrong as soon as we move the USB drive to another machine.

We're planning to burn the finished document and supporting material to a CD, and of course we need to be certain that all the links will work as expected.  What can we do to be sure the links will continue to work?

[m_s]

Okay, now I understand the difference between relative and absolute hyperlinks, I think I have this figured.  I just force the document to use absolute hyperlinks ('x' in the Hyperlinks Base box under document properties) and then update fields through the document (ctrl+a and right-clicking one of the links and selecting 'Update Fields' worked fine on my Word 2000, but in Word 2002 you no longer have this 'Update Fields' option, so I'm still scratching my head about doing this on 2002, though I think F9 is the key).

[Darwin]

This might be cumbersome, but you could try using USBDLM to set the USB drive to the same drive letter on each author's computer. I've done this on my home network (on three computers so far) so that I can sync data to an external harddrive from different locations without having to edit the synchronization profile to reflect changing drive letters.

At any rate, hope the relative hyperlinks option fixes this!