luminescence

I’ve been spoiled by several years of working with Atlassian’s Confluence wiki. So it was a shock to the system to change jobs and be introduced to the Microsoft SharePoint version of a wiki. Seriously? How can they even call it a wiki? No wiki markup to speak of, no preview, and things that are absolute basics in Confluence seem to require administrative programming to accomplish in SharePoint.

My struggle today was to create intrapage hyperlinks. I have a really long document, and wanted to have a table of contents at the top. Hmm, what’s the equivalent of the [toc] macro? Oh, there isn’t one? Plan B: use a wiki bookmark. Oh, that requires some server-level and site-level functionality to be enabled? Fat chance of me getting that approved in my lifetime. So off I went to find another solution.

I read about embedding functions, jQuery scripts, manually editing the source code… None of these things were appealing. Then I happened upon an innocuous post on StackExchange about the very thing I was trying to do. The last comment on the page, which had been voted down, was an easy and brilliant solution (abet ridiculous for this kind of product).

1. Open Microsoft Word to a blank document.
2. Create a list of your planned hyperlinks and their associated anchor destination.
3. Select each anchor destination, and on the Insert ribbon, click Bookmark.
4. Provide appropriate label text (no spaces) and click Add.
5. Select each planned hyperlink, and on the Insert ribbon, click Hyperlink.
6. In the dialog, click ‘Place in this document’ and select the related bookmark created in Step 4.
7. Once you’ve completed linking, select one or all and paste into the wiki page.
8. Cut, paste, and format the hyperlinks and anchors.

I’m very disappointed in this product for making something that should be very simple so difficult. I’ve had a low opinion of SharePoint for many years, but having seen demos of the most recent version, my opinion was slowing improving. But this alone has wiped out any goodwill that was developing.

For the original post, see How to add a hyperlink anchor in a SharePoint wiki page.