Sometimes, Microsoft Word documents contain embedded links to outside websites or links to documents on other Microsoft Office apps. If you use the web edition of Microsoft Word to open documents, you can now get a lot more info on any embedded links in those files.
In a blog post on the Microsoft 365 Insider blog, the company confirmed that more extensive previews of links in Word are now live in the web edition of the word-processing app without having actual access to the content of those links.
This may be a small feature, but in this day and age, where links in a document could lead to malware downloads or a phishing scheme, previewing linked content in Word without having to click on the link could be a huge help.
All you have to do is open an existing document in Word on the web and then click the text of any embedded link. You will then see a lot of info on that external link. Microsoft says that includes ” the website logo, the link title, the URL, an image, and a description of the content it contains.”
The blog post added:
Interactions with links have also gotten easier since you can now perform actions such as copy, edit and remove link using buttons in the preview window that appears when you click links in your document
You can also preview a linked heading or bookmark in a Word document on the web just by clicking on the link text.
If you want to use this feature in Microsoft Word on the web, you must first select the File option, then the About selection, and then click on Privacy Settings. Finally, you will have to click on the Enable optional connected experiences check box to turn on the new link preview feature.