How do I get a keyboard shortcut (CTRL+K or otherwise) working for hyperlink in OpenOffice?

Question

In OpenOffice (Writer, in this example), I can right-click on any toolbar, select Customize Toolbar, and then click the Keyboard tab in the dialog. At the top, there is a list of shortcut keys and a the bottom there is a list of commands. In the Insert category, I can find the command Hyperlink, select that and hit Modify, and the keyboard shortcut is assigned.

The expected behavior is that when I return to editing the document, I can highlight some text, press CTRL+K, and CTRL+V to paste a URL, and then close the dialog (not an intuitive process), and then the previously highlighted text will be a blue underlined hyperlink to the URL.

However, when I return to editing, select text and press CTRL+K, nothing happens.

I even went down in the Insert category to assign the keyboard shortcut to the function Insert Hyperlink. This causes CTRL+K to bring up the Character dialog to the Hyperlink tab, where I can paste a URL and close the dialog more intuitively, but link formatting is not automatically applied and it becomes hard to visually distinguish hyperlinked from normal text (which is important for the document I'm writing).

I'm using OpenOffice 4.1.3 (the most recent release) on Windows 7.

Answer 1

The Insert->Hyperlink function will only bring up the Hyperlink dialog if the selected text is already a hyperlink, so you can edit the hyperlink.

If you want to be able to insert a hyperlink where none previously existed (having selected no text or non-link text), you need to assign the Edit->Hyperlink function to the keyboard shortcut (note the difference in the lower left box):

Yes, the command names listed in the Shortcut Keys table is the same, and they bring up the same dialog box. But they are different functions, and the categories are swapped from the intuitive mapping.