Removing externally embedded content from documents
Who is this article for?Please Review Author trying to prepare documents with externally embedded content.
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Documents that include externally linked content that forms an embedded part of the document may fail to prepare in Please Review. The failure could cause Word processing to hang as Word needs to pull in external content from the Internet, but this poses a security risk. To use the document in Word, the links have to be removed.
This article is split into the following sections:
- Removing these links on a PC
- Removing these links on a Mac
1. Removing these links on a PC
In the latest versions of Word, you would go to File > Info > Edit Links to Files > select them all > Break Link
2. Removing these links on a Mac
On a Mac the same feature doesn't exist to allow a simple breaking of all the links here, To achieve this on a Mac each individual link has to be found in the document and removed.
To break a hyperlink in Word on a Mac, you can follow these steps:
- Open the doc in Word and press Opt+F9 (or Fn+Opt+F9 if you need to press Fn to make F9 work as that key and not a special command - different keyboards work differently in that regard)
- As you look at the document you field codes to indicate including content from external links, like this:
- Each of these needs removing one by one. They can be replaced by the actual image rather than an include statement.
- To go from one to the next use the gear wheel on the left and select the 'Advanced Find and Replace', the select the Go To option and select Field, then clicking Next should jump to each field code. You may need to filter the field codes to ones that are just including the content, depending on what types you are using there, if you have a lot of different ones in the document as it is only the ones that include external content that should be the focus here. Note that if one exists in the header or footer, this may need to be edited separately too: