Attention Microsoft Programmers, or Influential Competitors

I would like to create a document, stored on my hard drive, containing links to other documents stored on my hard drive. I don’t want to upload those other linked documents to an internet document file, because I don’t always want to have to hook up online to get access to those documents. I simply want to be able to turn on my computer, open one file, see an internal hyperlink (perhaps colored green instead of blue), click on the link, and have the second document open after having been accessed from its location on my hard drive. Is that possible to do now? If not, is it possible to make it happen? It would make my life as a teacher easier: I could create a syllabus with links to all the relevant documents, or perhaps with links to the relevant folders containing the relevant documents. For instance, if I have “Syllabus” saved on the desktop, I want to open it and click on the internal hyperlink “Elizabethan Literature,” which would then open my Elizabethan lit. file. Or, if I have “Hamlet reading schedule” listed, I would like to click on it and suddenly have the Word file “Hamlet reading schedule” pop up. It would be even better, of course, if, once the original document was published online, it could automatically make the linked docs accessible online, via actual hyperlinks, whenever one’s computer was online, but perhaps that would be too great a hassle – certainly the accessibility of such docs would be highly variable.

So, please, People Who Know More About Computers Than I, if such a capability already exists, please let me know. Consider this a bleg. And please, Microsoft Programmers Or Their Influential Competitors, if such a thing does not exist, please make it do so, quickly, so everyone else has to make it do so too, and then I’ll get it in my next computer when I buy it in a few years – but remember, you’ll have to let me know that it’s been put in, so don’t forget. Thank’ee much.

Sincerely,

J.