I am so frustrated! The following problem has occurred before and took me
ages to fix. Now it's happened again out of the blue.

I have a large spreadsheet in Excel 2000 which includes a couple of
hundred hyperlinks. I entered these (over a period of years) in 'absolute'
form, like this example:

C:\Docs\My Videos\PROJECTS\Dovedale 2010 Project\DVD cover
possibles\Front-1.jpg

But today I found that opening one displays the accurate but singularly
unhelpful message 'An unexpected error has occurred'.

And on examining the hyperlinks, I found that they are all now in
'relative' form like this:

...\..\..\My Videos\PROJECTS\Dovedale 2010 Project\DVD cover
possibles\Front-1.jpg

How can that arise? What is triggering Excel to make that unsolicited
change? It wouldn't matter so much if I never moved stuff around, but
that's precisely why I used absolute locations in the first place.

Dave Paterson gave me some advice on this on that previous occasion and
suggested entering a permanent Hyperlink base, such as C:\
I tried it without success and I see that box is now empty.

I've just tried entering C:\Docs and then C:\Docs\ but now on trying to
open a hyperlink I get 'The address of this site is not valid. Check the
address and try again.' Hardly surprising, as the hyperlink itself hasn't
changed and I don't really know how this 'hyperlink base' is getting used.
If it's simply a prefix to all my entries then that would now result in
links like
C:\Docs..\..\..\My Videos\PROJECTS\Dovedale 2010 Project\DVD cover
possibles\Front-1.jpg
which obviously aren't valid.

The central question is, with no base specified and absolute filenames
entered, why does Excel suddenly revert to these relative addresses?

Dave or anyone have any advice on this exasperating problem please?

--
Terry, East Grinstead, UK