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Recording a Macro

Adding a Little Animation to Your Life

Converting a Range of URLs to Hyperlinks

Making the Formula Bar Persistent

Engineering Calculations

Digital Signatures for Macros

Fixing the Decimal Point

 

Converting a Range of URLs to Hyperlinks

Summary: Converting a single URL into a hyperlink is easy. Converting hundreds or thousands can be much harder if you have to rely on manual methods. Here is a handy macro that can do the necessary conversion for you. (This tip works with Microsoft Excel 2000, Excel 2002, Excel 2003, and Excel 2007.)

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.

ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (3110) applies to Microsoft Excel versions: 2000 | 2002 | 2003 | 2007

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