Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Excel versions: 2000, 2002, and 2003. If you are using a later version (Excel 2007 or later), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for later versions of Excel, click here: Converting a Range of URLs to Hyperlinks.

Converting a Range of URLs to Hyperlinks

Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated June 26, 2021)
This tip applies to Excel 2000, 2002, and 2003


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.

Note:

If you would like to know how to use the macros described on this page (or on any other page on the ExcelTips sites), I've prepared a special page that includes helpful information. Click here to open that special page in a new browser tab.

ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (3110) applies to Microsoft Excel 2000, 2002, and 2003. You can find a version of this tip for the ribbon interface of Excel (Excel 2007 and later) here: Converting a Range of URLs to Hyperlinks.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. ...

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