Getting Started Guide

Introduction
This chapter describes how to do the following in Writer, Calc, Draw and Impress:
• Create hyperlinks within a document and to other documents such as web
pages, PDFs, and other files.
• Save documents as web pages (HTML documents).
When creating a document that you plan to deliver as a web page, you need to
consider the following:
• In an HTML document, hyperlinks are active (clickable) but other cross-
references inserted by OOo are not active links.
• An object such as a image is saved as a separate file. However, if that object
has been placed in a frame (for example, with an associated caption), it is not
saved and does not appear in the HTML document; instead, the name of the
frame appears.
Relative and absolute hyperlinks
Hyperlinks stored within a file can be either relative or absolute.
A relative hyperlink says, Here is how to get there starting from where you are now
(meaning from the folder in which your current document is saved) while an absolute
hyperlink says, Here is how to get there no matter where you start from.
An absolute link will stop working if the target is moved. A relative link will stop
working if the start and target locations change relative to each other. For instance, if
you have two spreadsheets in the same folder linked to each other and you move the
entire folder to a new location, an absolute hyperlink will break but a relative one will
not.
To change the way that OOo stores the hyperlinks in your file, select Tools >
Options > Load/Save > General and choose if you want URLs saved relatively
when referencing the File System, or the Internet, or both.
Calc will always display an absolute hyperlink. Don’t be alarmed when it does this
even when you have saved a relative hyperlink—this ‘absolute’ target address will be
updated if you move the file.
Note
Make sure that the folder structure on your computer is the same as the
file structure on your web server if you save your links as relative to the
file system and you are going to upload pages to the Internet.
Tip
When you rest the mouse pointer on a hyperlink, a help tip displays the
absolute reference, since OOo uses absolute path names internally. The
complete path and address can only be seen when you view the result of
the HTML export (saving the spreadsheet as an HTML file), by loading
the HTML file as Text, or by opening it with a text editor.
308 Getting Started with OpenOffice.org 3.3