I have Office 2003 and when I copy & paste a link from a website into Word, it’s shows up thus: just started this.
{ HYPERLINK "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nibiru cataclysm" }
Where did the word HYPERLINK & the {} come from? What am I doing wrong?

I reinstalled Office 2003 & it still does the same thing.

You have Word's field code display toggled on. Pressing Alt-F9 toggles it on/off.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]