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Can anyone offer a way to disable opening hyperlinks in Word 2003? GPO, regedit or 3rd party software, I'll try anything at this point. I'm pulling my hair out on this one.
Thanks!
"The future is already here - it's just unevenly distributed." - William Gibson
Please explain more clearly what you mean by "disable opening links in Word 2003": Do you want to prevent Word from creating hyperlinks altogether in your document? Or do you want the hyperlinks to be displayed in the document, but to not be able to click on them?
How about you try this:
Disabling Hyperlink Feature in Word 2003/2007
Yann Toledano, Digital Marketing Strategist YTConsulting.com Host, Web Building Forum, TechSoup.org Twitter: @webmanyann
I'm trying to prevent users from creating hyperlinks that can open letter drives on the system. I have a profile that has to connect to a mapped network drive. The drive is ordinarily inaccessible, but if a patron were lucky/smart enough to guess the drive letter and make a hyperlink in one of the Office 2003 apps, they could access it.
The contents of the drive (only 1 file) are read & execute only, but the Windows Explorer window that opens after opening the link in Office displays the "Folders" pane (ordinarily hidden) which shows a tree of the entire network, every computer, server and share.
I have gone into the various MS Office apps and used Tools>Customize to remove most references to "Insert Hyperlink" and "Open Hyperlink" options. But this doesn't feel like a very solid solution, in that it doesn't account for keyboard shortcuts and in Publisher and Excel I am unable to edit/customize the "shortcuts menu" (right-click) which is a serious set back.
I could disable right-click on these machines, but I would rather only do that as a last resort. It also doesn't prevent savvy users from using keyboard shortcuts, such as ctrl+k.
I'm running Active Directory and use GPOs as much as possible. I added the Office 2003 Policy Templates (ORKSP3AT) to Group Policy Managment Console, but the options are surprisingly limited. For example, there's only one entry under Disable Items in User Interface and that's a tooltip for disabled toolbar buttons and menu items. There's really nothing useful in there.
So far the closest I have come has been using User Configuration>Policies>Administrative Templates>Windows Components>Windows Explorer>Prevent Access to drives on My Computer. Using the option to restrict all drives worked well, but blocked access to flash drives.
Use TweakUI to hide the C:\ drive and any other letter drives you want to prevent direct hyperlinking too via MS Office 2003 apps.