I've searched all over the place for an answer to this and found many outdated solutions that no longer work. In this case Microsoft trumps Apple for helpful answers. found this on Microsoft forum and works for me. I am running Big Sur and Preview Version 11.
MacBook Pro 16″, macOS 11.0
Apple's Preview has not had link annotation since Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6.8), and one now must use a purchased PDF editor with that feature for post processing PDF documents with links. Apple's Pages, and LibreOffice both have straightforward means for applying hyperlinks to their document content before producing a Word, or PDF document.
Your linked article is from 2016, and the means to add links to a PDF via Word documents may have changed, or improved in four years. Office 2016 for Mac is now a retired Microsoft product.
Sure, very possibly. I can only say from my experience
I am running Word for Mac version 16.43 and Preview version 11 on a 2019 MacBook Pro with OS Big Sur
And the steps at that link work for me. I hope they might for others too
Adding Links to PDF using Preview
