Converting a Range of URLs to Hyperlinks

John has a workbook that has well over a thousands URLs in it, all in column A. These are not hyperlinks; they are straight text of individual URLs. John wants to convert the URLs to active hyperlinks, but doing the conversion individually is extremely tedious, especially for that many URLs.

As is the case with most tedium in Excel, the solution is to use a macro to do the conversion. To be effective, the macro would need to step through each cell in a selected range and, if the cell is not blank, convert the contents to a hyperlink. The following will do the trick:

Sub URL_List()
    For Each cell In Selection
        If cell.Value <> "" Then
            If Left(cell.Value, 7) = "http://" Then
                URL = cell.Value
            Else
                URL = "http://" + cell.Value
            End If
            ActiveSheet.Hyperlinks.Add Anchor:=cell, _
              Address:=URL, TextToDisplay:=cell.Value
        End If
    Next cell
End Sub

The macro is not foolproof; it assumes that if a cell contains anything at all it is a valid URL. What it does is to check the cell contents and, if the contents aren't prefaced by the "http://" text, then it is added. The hyperlink is then created based on the cell contents.