Creating a Word Document with Internal Bookmarks & Saving as a Web Page

Web pages with internal links (Bookmarks) are useful tools that make navigating a document very easy. To demonstrate this, I have created 5 sections in this document. These sections are named:

Each section above is clickable which means if I click on the Section 1 link, I will be immediately taken to the Section 1 portion of this document. Think of this as providing a visitor with a clickable index of a book. No matter how many pages are in Section 1, I can skip the entire section simply by clicking on another Section link above. This is much more user-friendly than scrolling through an entire document to get to the section you are interested in. Take a moment to give this a try. You may return to this Bookmark index by click on the Top of Page link underneath the individual section titles.

This document assumes you have already created a Word document with content you would like to learn how to bookmark. If you have not done so, please take a moment and create or open a Word document. The rest of this lesson will adhere to the following process:

Introduction (above)
Saving the document as HTML
Creating your bookmarks
Creating your navigation buttons
Linking the bookmarks to the navigation buttons
Editing bookmarks
Top of page links

Let’s get started!

Saving your document as HTML

The final step in this process is to save your Word document as a webpage. To do this:

Click on the Office Button in the upper-left corner .
Click on Save As .
The Save As dialogue box will open in a new window. In the Save as type: dropdown menu, choose Web Page (*.htm;*.html) .
Click on Save.

This conversion process may compromise some of your document spacing and indentation. Take the time to thoroughly check your document to make sure your spacing and indents are as they should be.

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Creating your bookmarks

For each section of your document you wish to bookmark, follow these steps:

Left-click on the title of your first section (I have named mine Creating your bookmarks directly above). Think of this part as actually putting a bookmark between the pages of a book, only this one is digital.
Once your cursor is flashing where you want to place the bookmark, click on the Insert menu at the top of the screen and choose Bookmark under the Links grouping.
Type in the name of your bookmark (in this example I call it Create) and click Add.
Continue onward to the next section of your document you wish to bookmark and repeat steps 1-3 above.

Please note: Bookmarks must contain a letter first. If you want to add a number after the letter(s) you can. For instance, C1 is a valid bookmark, however 1 is not.

As part of this process, please create a bookmark at the very first line of the document, which will serve as our home or index (more on this in Top of Page links). Once you have finished creating all of your bookmarks, it’s time to create the navigation buttons or index labels.

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Create you navigation buttons

Your navigation buttons are the buttons a user will click on to be warped to the appropriate section of the document. In this document, the navigation buttons look like this:

Section 1

Section 2

Section 3

Section 4

Section 5

It will be emphasized here that it’s important to use tables to separate parts of your webpage whenever possible. Tables allow independent formatting of discrete areas of a page giving you tighter control over a smaller space. That said, you will see that I created a single table with one row and five columns above. This was done by:

Click on the Insert menu at the top of the screen.
Click on the Table menu.
Choose the number of columns (vertical) and rows (horizontal) you want in your table by mousing-over the correct number of white squares.
Left-click when you highlight the proper number of cells and your table will be created.
In each of the cells, put the titles of the sections you would like to link to. In the example above, I chose to name my cells Section 1 – Section 5.

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Linking the bookmarks to the navigation buttons

The next step in the process is to link the navigation buttons to the bookmarks.

In the table you created above above, left-click and highlight the text you want to link.
At the top of the Word document, click on Insert.
Click on Hyperlink
Click on Bookmarks
Click on the appropriate bookmark from the list and click OK.
Click OK again and your Bookmark will be created.

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Editing bookmarks

When you add a bookmark to a block of text, Microsoft Office Word surrounds the text with square brackets. When you change a bookmarked item, make sure that you change the text or graphics inside the brackets.

Display bookmark brackets

Click the Microsoft Office Button , and then click Word Options.
Click Advanced, and then select the Show bookmarks check box under Show document content.
Click OK.

If you assign a bookmark to an item, the bookmark appears in brackets ([…]) on the screen. If you assign a bookmark to a location, the bookmark appears as an I-beam. The brackets are not printed.

Bookmark changes that you can make

You can cut, copy, and paste items that are marked with a bookmark. You can also add text to, and delete text from, marked items.

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