Have you ever pasted a chunk of text from a web page directly into a Microsoft Word document? If so, you may have noticed the entire block of text act as a hyperlink. What if you want to delete part of the text and make other changes — unfortunately, you can't. The text behaves as if it were a large graphic — and in essence, it is. It is a hyperlink block — and if you try to edit it, you "activate" the link — your browser launches with the linked page in view.

In the following example, you are writing a draft of a presentation in Word and are pulling a lot of research from the Internet. You paste the purple text (below) from a web page into the Word document.

Now you want to edit the copied text — put it into your own words and delete some of it. You try to select a sentence, and BOOM, the cursor changes to a hand. When you click, your browser opens with the web page displayed.

This can be annoying at best — but it can really be a problem when you are pasting a lot of text from the Internet into a document. Fortunately, this is a very easy problem to correct.

To turn off automatic hyperlinks on "pasted" text

1. Open Word and create the document as desired.



2. Copy and paste the selection that contains the hyperlink. (You may not even know a text block is hyperlinked until you go to edit it.)



3. Move the mouse over the hyperlink section of text. (The mouse should change into a pointing hand.)



4. Right-click.



5. Select Hyperlink > Edit Hyperlink.



6. Click Remove Link. The hyperlink is removed and you can edit the text as desired.

Note You can also change the font of pasted hyperlinks with a simple click as well. Just right-click on the text and choose Font.