Automagically link pasted URLs in Word

March 17, 2017 2:36 PM

How can I force Word to automatically recognize URLs in blocks of pasted text and link them?

I am working in Endnote, gathering citations from a variety of sources and developing lists for researchers. Many of these folks are not Endnote users. They want to read a list of citations and abstracts with a nice URL at the bottom to click if they want the article. They have no interest in learning to use a citation manager. But since I'm gathering these from multiple databases and sources, I want to format them all nicely by gathering in Endnote and exporting from there.

When I export citations from Endnote using a custom format, I can get all the data I need into Word, but I can get Word to automatically link the URLs. If I press the space bar after each URL, it's linked. But I'll be damned if I'm going to go through every citation list to do this manually.

Bonus points: can anyone tell me how to structure my export fields in Endnote to give me a URL that runs through my institutions link resolver?

posted by cosmicbandito to Computers & Internet (1 answer total)

I have no experience with EndNote, but it seems to me that running a macro on your Word document to add hyperlinks to all your URLs, after you finish pasting them all in, may do the trick. Here is a proposed solution which I haven't verified:

https://www.go4expert.com/forums/macro-convert-urls-hyperlinks-ms-word-t15899/
posted by Pfardentrott at 3:46 PM on March 17, 2017