Microsoft Visio 2010 : Understanding Relative and Absolute Hyperlinks

With Visio, you can build two types of links:

• A relative link provides a path to a resource by assuming a known starting location.

  As an analogy in the physical world, let’s say you need to attend a meeting in room 216 at Lucerne Publishing. If you’re standing at the reception desk in the lobby of the company’s office and ask where the meeting is located, the receptionist might say, “Go up to the second floor and it’s the second door on the right.” Based on the known starting location you share with the receptionist, the lobby, that information is sufficient to get you to the intended location.

  Relative links in a Visio drawing work in a similar way. The folder containing the Visio drawing serves as “the lobby,” and hyperlink targets on the same disk drive are found relative to that starting point.

  For Visio drawings, relative links work very nicely when the relationship between the starting point and the hyperlink targets remains fixed. Problems can arise, however, if you need to move the Visio drawing file to another computer or even to another location on the same computer. In this case, you must preserve the relative relationships from the new location of the Visio file to the target folders and files. One way you can accomplish this is by copying the entire directory structure containing the Visio drawing and its hyperlink targets.

• An absolute link contains all of the information required to locate a linked resource, regardless of the starting point.

  Returning to our meeting analogy, if you’re at home and need directions to the conference room at Lucerne Publishing, you need a lot more information to arrive at your destination. An absolute address for the meeting room would look more like the following:

  Lucerne Publishing, Room 216, 3456 Elm St., San Francisco, CA 94117 USA

  Armed with an absolute address, you can get to the meeting from your home, or for that matter, from any starting location in the world.

  For Visio hyperlinks, absolute links work regardless of where your Visio drawing is located. You can move the drawing to a different computer and the links will continue to function without requiring any other changes.

Tip:

Relative and absolute hyperlinks are not mutually exclusive in a single drawing. In fact, many Visio drawings contain a mix of the two link types.

What does all of this have to do with the check box in the Visio Hyperlinks dialog box?

For a saved drawing, Visio assumes that the path to the target of a hyperlink begins in the same folder that contains the Visio drawing. Thus, the default behavior in Visio is to create a relative hyperlink using the location of your Visio drawing as the starting point for the path. When someone clicks your hyperlink, Windows figures out where the target object is by navigating from the location of the Visio drawing.

Just knowing this much explains why the Use Relative Path For Hyperlink check box is unavailable if you haven’t yet saved your drawing—Visio can’t create a relative link yet because there is no known starting point for the Visio drawing. Consequently, the only option is to use an absolute path that contains all of the information Windows will need to track down the target object.

Although there are no absolute guidelines on when to use relative links rather than absolute links, it’s a good idea to think about your environment and the nature of your document collection before creating very many links in Visio. If all of your target documents are in their final resting place, on a network server, for example, then absolute links probably make the most sense. However, if your environment is more volatile, or you know in advance that you’ll be moving your Visio drawing and its hyperlink targets to another computer or to a CD or DVD, then carefully constructed relative links are a good choice.

In addition to that advice, the following examples will help you to understand when Visio creates relative or absolute links.

Warning:

Important

When you use the Hyperlinks dialog box to browse to and select a target document, Visio fills in the Address box and selects the Use Relative Path For Hyperlink check box based on the locations of the Visio drawing and the target document.

For the examples that follow, assume that the HR Process Maps drawing, is saved in C:\Human Resources\Process Maps\ and that the hyperlink target is one of the Word documents shown in the following directory listing.

Tip:

The file name of each Word document includes a parenthetical note to indicate whether it is in a directory above or below the Visio document, or is in the same directory.

• When the target document is in the same folder as HR Process Maps.vsd, which obviously means that it is on the same disk drive as the Visio drawing, Visio creates a relative hyperlink and the Address box contains the following:

  MyDocument (same).docx

  

  If you now clear the Use Relative Path For Hyperlink check box, the link becomes an absolute link that begins at the root of drive C. The Address box displays the full path to the document:

  C:\Human Resources\Process Maps\MyDocument (same).docx

  

• When you link to a document located in C:\Human Resources\Process Maps \Recruiting\, which is a subfolder of the one containing the Visio drawing, Visio creates a relative hyperlink and the Address box contains the following:

  Recruiting\MyDocument (below).docx

  This indicates that the target document is in a folder called Recruiting.

  

• When the target document is located in C:\Human Resources\, which is above the folder containing the Visio document, Visio creates a relative hyperlink and the Address box contains the following:

  ..\MyDocument (above).docx

  

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  Tip:

  “..\” is arcane syntax that predates Windows. It means “go up one directory level.”

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• When the target document is located on any drive other than the one containing the Visio document, for example, drive D or drive K or a network share such as \\MyServer\Human Resources\FY2011\, Visio creates an absolute link and the Address box contains something like the following:

  D:\SomeFolder\MyDocument.docx

  or

  \\MyServer\Human Resources\FY2011\MyDocument.docx

  The following figure shows a target document on drive N.

  

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  Tip:

  Although the link shown in the previous graphic is an absolute link because the target object is located on a network drive, the Use Relative Path For Hyperlink check box still appears with a check mark. Just to confuse things further, if you try to clear the check box, you will find that you can’t do so.

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Warning:

Important

You can only create relative links to files that are located on the same physical hard drive as the saved Visio drawing.

Tip:

Visio always creates an absolute link if you begin your address with a server name, drive letter, or web protocol. All of the following will create absolute links regardless of the location of the Visio drawing:

• C:\SomeFolder\MyWorkbook.xlsx

• \\MyServer\Presentations\MySlideShow.pptx

• http://MyWebSite.com/Somepage.html