Adding links containing spaces to an email message

Possibly slightly off-topic for this blog, but so far I’m doing quite a good job of not settling down on a single topic ;-)

Outlook has the nice feature that if you type something that looks like a link into an email, it will automatically create the link for you. Now, suppose you have a share on a server: “\\server\Some Share” (without the quotes). If you simply type this in, Outlook is confused by the space and you end up with

Fortunately there is a simply workaround. Unfortunately, very few people seem to be aware of it! All you need to do is enclose the link text in angle brackets. So you’d actually type “<\\server\Some Share>” (without the quotes). Now when Outlook creates the link, it uses the full text between the brackets:

And that’s it! Now start using it, and tell everyone else about it. You can always point them to the official write-up if you’d rather.