Hyperlinks in an Index

Subscriber Beth Hunter recently asked if it was possible to establish hyperlinks between index entries and the text they reference, just as you can between TOC entries and the headings they reference.

The results are unanimous, Beth--you can't do this in Word. (If it is any consolation, everyone agreed that it makes sense to have this capability.) This means that your only solution is to write your own macro to do such cross-linking. Creating such a macro would be fairly complex, however. You can either write a macro that will examine the index and create the hyperlinks in one pass, or you can write a macro that will look up a reference from the index on the fly.

If you choose the latter route (doing it on the fly), you can find additional helpful information at Microsoft's Web sites. Specifically, Cindy Meister wrote a series of three articles on Word fields that provides a solution. Check out these links:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/periodic/period00/WordFieldsPartI.htm
http://www.officevba.com/features/2000/05/vba200005cm_f/vba200005cm_f.asp
http://www.officevba.com/features/2000/06/vba200006cm_f/vba200006cm_f.asp

The last link provides the most "meat" that is applicable to the question at hand. Using the information in these articles you could create a macro that recognizes when someone double-clicks in an index. A macro then gleans the word being double-clicked, gets the page number for the entry, goes to that page, and finds the word. As you can imagine, this is no trivial macro. It works nicely but involves writing a class module to handle the event and only works for Word 2000 or later.