I have over 1000 Word documents with hyperlinks with relative paths to other documents. Most were created with Office 2007.




I recently updated my main machine to Office 2021 (a local license, not 365) and the links were all still working and the relative paths were visible if I opened a file and clicked on Edit Hyperlink. Well at least they were until yesterday.


Today, only the absolute paths are visible. However, if I copy one of the files to another machine which still has Office 2007 on it I can see that the relative paths are still there.


What has happened between yesterday and today? Has there been an automatic update that's broken the relative file display? Or could I have clicked on an option to display absolute rather than relative paths, even if the paths are actually relative?


Any ideas?

I know of no sudden change in Word 2021. Which update/build do you have?
File > Account > About Word

Relative paths have always been finicky, IMO.
See also: Word Fields and Relative Paths to External Files

Microsoft® Word 2021 MSO (Version 2310 Build 16.0.16924.20054) 64-bit

There you go: Microsoft® Word 2021 MSO (Version 2310 Build 16.0.16924.20054) 64-bit



TBH relative paths have never played up for me. Until now...

Hmm. There is definitely something strange going on.


If I edit an existing file on machine #1 (Office 2021), create a new hyperlink, save the file and then reopen it on machine #2 (Office 2007), the old links are all still relative, but the new one is absolute.*


Are there any settings I could have accidently changed to cause new links to be absolute?


*Edit: Scrap that: the old and new links are all still relative on Office 2007 on machine #2, so it is purely a display issue on Word 2021.


So: Are there any settings I could have accidently changed to cause all links to be displayed as absolute when I Edit a link? Note that if I Edit/Copy/Paste an existing link into a new link then that becomes an absolute link on Office 2007.

I know of nothing in Word 2021 that does this differently, but obviously, there is much changed in 2021. Have you read Paul Edstein's article?
Word Fields and Relative Paths to External Files

The weird thing is that it was fine until a few days ago and then suddenly changed.


I'll take a look at that article though.

This also happened to my installation of Office 2016 on the same date.
Microsoft® Word 2016 MSO (Version 2310 Build 16.0.16924.20054) 64-bit

I can provide an examples of the PDF file produced on October 29 having correct relative links, while a PDF file generated from the same DOCX source after November 1 has all fullly-qualified links in the PDF.

This is especially bad for producing PDF files, since all the formerly relative links in a large document are now fully qualified.
I also just found that newly-added hyperlinks in the DOCX file become fully qualified when rendered in HTML, while earlier untouched links remain as relative in the HTML.

I have Word 2010 available, so I can use it for now, but no longer having relative links is actually crippling to my requirements.

Hello!

I also came across this issue recently.

It seems like, the hyperlinks still work as relative links but are always displayed as absolute links under "edit hyperlinks". When using the "Alt+F9" function, the hyperlinks are correctly displayed as relative.

This then becomes a problem when converting files into pdfs. Within the pdfs, the links are also absolute and useless when changing the storage location.

Is there already some kind of solution to this problem? Is that intended by Microsoft or a bug?

Thank you for any help!