Most people are familiar with hyperlinks from browsing the web. They allow you to connect together related web pages in a convenient way. They have the added advantage that they are informative yet unobtrusive because they are part of the normal wording of the document rather than a separate addition.
It struck me that such a useful technique might be incorporated into my written work. There were two areas where I thought it might come in useful: hyperlinked content pages for long documents and hyperlinked cross-references to original data.
The key to hyperlinks in documents is creating markers within the documents to indicate a location for a document to go to. There are two kinds, general reference points that identify points within a document but otherwise have no distinguishing feature, and specific reference points for identifying locations with a particular quality - e.g. section headings, authority references and so forth.
Creating general reference points in word is easy. Place the cursor at the point in the text where you want to insert the bookmark and then go to the top menu INSERT> BOOKMARK. You will be prompted to enter a bookmark name. I suggest that you be as descriptive as possible so that you can easily identify from the name what the bookmark points to. Since the bookmark name cannot have any gaps in it you may wish to use underscores to make it more readable.
You can set the bookmarks to be visible or invisible - change their status in TOOLS> OPTIONS> VIEW. If they are visible then you will see them either as a grey I bar or as brackets around the selected text. Though they are visible on the screen they will not print out.
Now that you have these reference points inserted there are all manner of things that you can do with them. If you simply want to jump to a particular bookmark then go to INSERT> BOOKMARK and the pop up menu will show you a list of all the bookmarks in the document and you simply need to highlight the one that you want and then click GO TO.
Much more useful is to create hyperlinks that lead to the bookmark. This you do by highlighting the reference text and then hitting CTRL + K or going to INSERT> HYPERLINK. This brings up a menu that identifies a number of possible hyperlink destinations. For present purposes assume that the hyperlink is an existing file. Browse to the file you want and highlight it. Then click PLACE IN THIS DOCUMENT, which will bring up a list of the identifiable locations in the document. This list should include your pre-prepared bookmarks. Highlight the one that you want and click OK. Now your highlighted words should turn blue and act like a hyperlink.
I have found this process to be an extremely useful way of creating an index for a transcript. During a long trial it is necessary to have a way of quickly finding pertinent passages in the oral evidence recorded in the transcript. Traditionally the junior barrister toils away into the night creating a "transcript bash" - an index to the transcript that identifies useful passages. The problem I have always had with this process is deciding whether to quote the passage from the evidence in the index - accurate but often time-consuming to do and quickly becoming unwieldy in size - or to give a summary of what is said - which may not accurately reflect the evidence. I also wanted to be able to re-use the index when presenting final arguments to the judge, whether by inserting references to the evidence in the written closing submissions or as a table of references. The hyperlink proves to be the answer.
At the end of each day I receive an emailed version of the transcript. I save these in a particular folder specifically for the transcripts. As I go through the day's transcript I add bookmarks next to passages in the cross-examination that I think are of particular importance. I then create a separate document in which I list the issues within the case as subject headings and below them I put short references to relevant evidence passages. These short references are hyperlinked to the bookmarks. In that way the index document never becomes unwieldy but I can quickly reference exactly what was said. Then when I creating the closing submissions I can use the same bookmarks to insert hyperlinks to passages of evidence that I particularly want the judge to see. It is then a matter of burning a CD-ROM with the folder containing the transcripts on it and the closing submissions with the hyperlinks. The hyperlinks have dynamic file names so that the links are not broken when you move them from your hard disk to a CD-ROM.
Trust me, judges love it when you make things easy for them. If they just need to click a link to see the evidence you are referring to rather than dig out a file of transcripts and turn up the right page they are much, much more likely to do it. Remember, a funky bit of technical gimcrackery beats careful analysis of the evidence 9 times out of 10!
I reckon that I could expand this process to include scanning in all the written evidence, inserting bookmarks in those files and then performing the same process as with the transcripts.
Labels: bookmarks, guide, hyperlinks, ms word 2003, software, transcript bash
