In an MS Excel document, I have a PDF link
, when I open that link, it opens Adobe and closes it right away (the document never opens...it's just the empty usual frame of Adobe that opens and closes).
Adobe Acrobat 7.0 standard
MS Excel 2000 or MS Excel 2002 or
MS Excel 2003 or
MS Excel 2007
Windows 2000 or
Windows XP Pro
As for your problem - It has to do with how linking works out of MS apps. When linking out, Excel (Word, PowerPoint, etc.) will try to open the OLE linked object and embed it into the root document. PDFs cannot be OLE embedded in this manner as the applications have no native support for the file format.
In other words, MS Office apps would like to control the app necessary to open the document for OLE to work. Reader/Acrobat generally does not allow this outside of the browswer plug-in.
It can be done with custom apps through the programming APIs (example: PDF viewer integrated into document retrieval system) but not via OLE in this manner.
If someone else has other suggestions, please chime in. Thanks.
Douglas Hanna is a member of the Production Print Technology team at Aon.
www.aonhewitt.com