Change is coming. One thing to look forward to would be the launch of Microsoft Office 2010. Come the middle of this year, the new version of the Office Suite will part the curtains to emerge from the backstage. I have given the Public Beta a miss and am still hashing away at my old Office 2007.

MS Office 2007 has been the workhorse for me and I still depend on it for my writing needs. And there are some extras that I wish I can take with me when the new version finally rolls out. One of these is a useful and free Word add-on called the Document Hyperlink Checker.

Whether it's drafting a document or sending across a final copy in the DOC format, a regular piece is often not without hyperlinks and references to external sources. The Document Hyperlink Checker as its name suggests does one job alone - it runs through all the hyperlinks in the document and checks up on their correctness.

The free Word 2007 add-on can quickly find suspicious and broken internal links in Microsoft Word documents of any size. That's important when a manual re-check is wearisome.

For a writer, a preoccupation with correct reference links is important. A broken link or a link which points to the wrong source dumbs down his work. This is where the simple functionality of the Document Hyperlink Checker becomes important in the review phase.

Download & Installation

The free add-on for MS Word 2007 is a 1.3MB download [Broken URL Removed] and it installs a new tab on the MS Office Ribbon. The AbleBits tool has a single touch button for the link checker interface.

free link checker

The Word Hyperlink Checker add-in is designed for Microsoft Word 2000, 2002, 2003, and Microsoft Word 2007.

A press on the Hyperlink checker for Word brings up the interface of the program. The Show All button brings up the entire listing for the links in a document. The total number of links is indicated.

free document link checker

The Suspicious button filters all the hyperlinks which the program finds problematic (marked with a ?) for some reason. The reason is displayed in the status bar of the add-on.

You can also limit the hyperlink check using the three page range options given.

One useful help for checking the hyperlinks is the easy navigation between the URL listing in the list and the corresponding source in the document.

The Good & The Bad

The add-on is good in the way it catches all the links in a document. But it has a very narrow definition of what a suspicious link is. For instance, a hyperlinked website (written as) Amazon will show up in the suspicious list because the name is capitalized and the URL is not. Written as "˜amazon', it will pass the test.

The add-on also does not give any means to checkup the link through a browser. For that you have to fall back on Word's CTRL-CLICK shortcut. A way to correct a broken link in the add-on interface itself is definitely on the wish list.

I believe it's the only tool that catches the links in a Word document. For this reason alone and minus its shortcomings, it could be helpful when you have a multipage document to deal with and need to run through the links.

Have you used the Document Hyperlink Checker [Broken URL Removed]? Do you think it helped you with your hyperlinks?