How to Make Clickable Links in a PDF
Posted 11/04/2010 at 10:50am
| by Scott Rose
I created a document in Microsoft Word with lots of hyperlinks, but when I save the document as a PDF file, the hyperlinks are not clickable. Do you know what I have to do to make these links clickable?
This is a strange phenomenon with Microsoft Word that we never noticed until you pointed it out. It appears that the hyperlinks inside your PDF file are clickable if you open your PDF in Adobe Reader, but not in Apple’s Preview. But since most Mac users use Preview to read their PDF files, you can never be assured that your recipients will be able to click on your links.

OpenOffice looks and acts just like Word, but it properly embeds hyperlinks in your exported PDF files.
The good news is that we tested this behavior in both OpenOffice (free, openoffice.org) and Pages ($79, apple.com), and hyperlinks in both of those programs work just fine when you export your documents as PDF files. Since both of those programs will open up your existing Word documents, we would recommend using one of them to create your PDF files instead or even switching completely if you create these hyperlink-happy PDF files often.