Access 2016 For Dummies
Book image
Explore Book Buy On Amazon

If you don’t need your data to sit in the cloud via an Access web app, you can connect your desktop database to the outside world. The term hyperlink is probably quite familiar — it’s the text or pictures that serve as jumping-off points to other data.

Click a hyperlink, and you go to another web page. Click an image that’s set up as a hyperlink (your mouse pointer turns to a pointing finger), and you go to a larger version of the image — or to another website where information pertaining to the subject of the image can be found. Underlined text (or text in a different color or that changes color when you point to it) is the typical sign of the existence of a hyperlink.

So what’s this hyperlink stuff? Although hyperlink makes it sound like a link that’s had way too much coffee, within the context of Microsoft Office (of which Access is a part), it’s actually a special storage compartment for storing the address of a resource on either the Internet or your local corporate network (or a file stored on your local computer). Hyperlinks start with a special identification code that explains to the computer what kind of resource it’s pointing to and where that resource is.

Check out the most common protocol codes (a harmless but scary-sounding term that simply refers to portions of the programming code that allow a browser to use a hyperlink). You’ll find, along with the code itself, an explanation of the kind of resource the code refers to.

Protocol Code What It Does
file:// Opens a local or network-based file.
ftp:// File Transfer Protocol; links to an FTP server.
http:// Hypertext Transfer Protocol; links to a web page.
mailto: Sends email to a network or Internet address.
news:// Opens an Internet newsgroup.

For more information on links and how Access understands and uses them, press F1 or click the handy Help icon (the question mark in the upper right corner of the Access screen) to open the Access Help system and then search for the term hyperlink.

If you surf the web regularly, many of these terms and concepts should be familiar. Although most of them are geared to Internet or intranet applications, Access can also use hyperlinks to identify locally stored documents (that’s what file:// does). This enables you, for example, to create a hyperlink in your Access table that opens a Word document, an Excel spreadsheet, or a JPEG image file. This technology is so flexible that the sky’s literally the limit.

About This Article

This article is from the book:

About the book authors:

Laurie Ulrich Fuller is a professional technology author and trainer. She's created training materials that cover Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Suite. Ken Cook is a professional database developer, instructor, and author. The two experts have teamed to write the previous three editions of Access For Dummies.

This article can be found in the category: