Yes, it's 2008 and MOSS 2007 has been out for some time, but some of us are still flailing along with SharePoint 2003. One gripe I have with SharePoint 2003 (among many), is the limited range of text markup you can do in a standard List--I guess this is largely due to the text editor control in SP2003.
One thing I would really like to do is create nice hyperlink text in the bodies of my list items. Since the text editor control contains no feature to do this, I'm forced to literally paste hyperlinks into the body of my text. This makes my posts less than attractive, but seems to be the only way to do it...until now.
The "Hack"
So, what I'd like to do is add a new item to, say, my Announcements list that looks like this:
Hey, everybody. Be sure to check out Scott Guthrie's new list of .NET links. There's some cool stuff there!
Notice that "list" is an anchor to the link I'm announcing. Instead of that nice, tidy post, I have to do something like this:
Hey, everybody. Be sure to check out Scott Guthrie's new list (http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/11/06/nov-6th-links-asp-net-asp-net-ajax-jquery-asp-net-mvc-silverlight-and-wpf.aspx) of .NET links. There's some cool stuff there!
Here, I have to literally paste the link into the text of my post. That might be fine for one or two links, but if I have several links to drop into my text, the text can become quite hard to read. Well, recently, I stumbled upon a solution to my problem.
Step 1
In the text editor, just type up the text how I'd like it to look...
Step 2
Now, copy the ScottGu link in my clipboard and replace the word "list" with the ScottGu hyperlink...
Step 3
Now, very carefully, highlight the entire URL and type your link word over it: in this case, type the word "list" over it. Notice that "list" takes on the appearance of a hyperlink!
Step 4
Save your post. Now, you have nice, clean text in your list item and the hyperlink is still there, too!
The only problem I've found with this approach is if you wish to make your hyperlink text a phrase instead of a single word. For example:
Hey, everybody. Be sure to check out Scott Guthrie's new list of .NET links. There's some cool stuff there!
In the SharePoint text editor, as soon as you hit that space between "new" and "list", the link seems to stop; thus, only "new" would become hypertext while "list" would remain plain, ordinary text. If you must make an entire phrase a hyperlink, I guess you could either put an underscore (_) between words instead of a space or go through the trouble of repeating Steps 1-4 for every word in the phrase. That might drive you crazy, but at least you'd have nice text!