CTRL + Click is the normal convention for any Microsoft product when the file is in Editing mode. You'll see when then you're writing an email, when you're creating a document or spreadsheet, etc. Using CTRL + Click allows you to use a regular click in a consistent way: as a placer or selector command.

As Word documents are always editable, you'll always need to press CTRL prior to clicking the link in order for it to work while the file is in that format. But once you've exported the file to any non-editable format, such as PDF or HTML, you'll find the links will behave as you expect, opening with a "simple" click.

Within Word you can change the View to Read Mode in the View tab and then you'll just be able to click the link without having to hold CTRL, but this only works because you're not editing the document when you're in Read mode and so there's no reason for Word to assume you wish to place or select in that context.

Simple click doesn't work, and my software is already set to have Ctrl + Click open hyperlinks. If there are any other suggestions?

As @phuzi said in the comments you can use double click to select the word or double click and drag to select word to word (it will snap on the last character of each word). If you triple-click on a line or click on line num, it will select the whole line (with the invisible character at last '\n').
If you press CTRL + D it will select the word where the cursor is. Also if there are multiple instance of same word you can select them all one after another using CTRL + D.