Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Excel versions: 97, 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: Extracting URLs from Hyperlinks.

Extracting URLs from Hyperlinks

Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated September 25, 2020)
This tip applies to Excel 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003


30

Mezga has a series of cells that contain hyperlinks. These hyperlinks consist of words such as "click here" or "more information." In other words, each hyperlink contains display text that is different from the underlying URL that is activated when the link is clicked. Mezga would like to know if there is a way, without using a macro, to extract the underlying URL for each of these hyperlinks and place that URL into a different cell.

Without using macros, you can do this:

  1. Right-click a hyperlink. You'll see a Context menu appear.
  2. From the Context menu, choose Edit Hyperlink. Excel displays the Edit Hyperlink dialog box. (See Figure 1.)
  3. Figure 1. The Edit Hyperlink dialog box.

  4. Select and copy (Ctrl+C) the entire URL from the Address field of the dialog box.
  5. Press Esc to close the Edit Hyperlink dialog box.
  6. Paste the URL into any cell desired.

Note that this is for a single hyperlink. If you have a whole bunch of hyperlinks in a worksheet and you want to recover the URLs, you need to do this for each and every hyperlink. Obviously this can get tedious very quickly.

The cure for tedium—like them or not—is a macro. With a macro, getting at the underlying URL for a hyperlink is child's play. All the macro needs to do is pay attention to the Address property of the hyperlink. The following is an example of a macro that will find each hyperlink in a worksheet, extract each one's URL, and stick that URL in the cell directly to the right of the hyperlink.

Sub ExtractHL()
    Dim HL As Hyperlink
    For Each HL In ActiveSheet.Hyperlinks
        HL.Range.Offset(0, 1).Value = HL.Address
    Next
End Sub

Instead of a "brute force" macro, you could also create a user-defined function that would extract and return the URL for any hyperlink at which it was pointed:

Function GetURL(rng As Range) As String
    On Error Resume Next
    GetURL = rng.Hyperlinks(1).Address
End Function

In this case you can place it where you want. If you want, for example, the URL from a hyperlink in A1 to be listed in cell C25, then in cell C25 you would enter the following formula:

=GetURL(A1)

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 (3281) applies to Microsoft Excel 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. You can find a version of this tip for the ribbon interface of Excel (Excel 2007 and later) here: Extracting URLs from 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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Comments

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What is three minus 1?

2022-05-24 19:00:51

Glenn

Doesn't work. I get #NAME error
Function GetURL(rng As Range) As String
On Error Resume Next
GetURL = rng.Hyperlinks(1).Address
End Function

GetURL(E30)


2021-11-30 10:56:38

Pavel

thanks for the code. You saved me a lot of time.

I used the GetURL to extract URL from cells in Excel for Mac (v16) and works like charm.


2021-11-07 06:34:21

Narendra

Hi,
It is not working


2021-04-09 21:31:52

John Norris

User defined function Get URL does not work with O-365 Excel.


2020-10-16 05:58:56

Lorenz Michels

Thanks for the function GetURL! When using it, I discovered that it wouldn't return the complete URL if you had a query in it like:

https://www.google.com/search?q=peanutbutter&rlz=1C1CHBD_enNL893NL893&oq=peanutbutter&aqs=chrome..69i57j46i10j0i10j46i10j0j46i10l2.3348j0j15&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

This would only return: https://www.google.com/search?

Therefore I mimicked your function to be able to get the query as well:
Function GetSubURL(rng As Range) As String
On Error Resume Next
GetSubURL = rng.Hyperlinks(1).SubAddress
End Function


2020-07-08 09:54:39

Don

Thanks Peter, that works for the server! Still truncated for local hard drive links.


2020-07-07 21:51:41

Peter

Retrieve the subaddress of the hyperlink to build the full address when the URL includes a #

With rng.Hyperlinks(1)
GetURL = .Address
if .SubAddress >"" then GetURL=GetURL & "#" & .SubAddress
End With


2020-07-06 11:31:23

Don

Unfortunately this results in a truncated address, "..\..\don.MAIN\Documents\Other Folder(s)\MyFile.xlsx" instead of c:\users\don.main\etc. The same problem occurs with files on our server, which recently changed names (as did my don.main), although I was able to use VBA to find and replace the still visible \don.main\, I wasn't able to do so with the server links, whose name was truncated. I cannot use the "..\..\"part to search and replace because then I would destroy the links to files/folders on my computer. How do I get the FULL address?
Windows 10 Professional, Excel 2013.


2020-03-03 16:39:43

Patrick L. Gillen

Craig from 2019-11-06: excellent tip. I spent too long going nowhere with the VBA sub method. Thanks a lot!!!


2019-11-06 12:06:19

Craig

I found an easy way to convert hyperlinked text into simple URLS:

1) select and copy cells with hyperlinked text
2) open Outlook and paste text into draft email
3) change formatting from "HTML" to plain text
4) see text links convert to full URLs
5) copy these back into Excel


2019-07-18 23:19:59

PeilingW

Thanks! Very helpful and much used. Wondered why Microsoft does not include this as a standard function just like =Len(A1)


2019-03-09 10:06:53

Willy Vanhaelen

@Ricardo Ruiz
HL.Address truncates everything after and incuding # (hash sign). You can try to first replace # by %23. This might work.


2019-03-08 19:37:54

Ricardo Ruiz

This is a great Trick!! However, I am having an issue pulling the full hyperlink. Does the Marco not recognize the pound sign? I have over 1500 links I am trying to pull the full hyperlink and this would make my life a lot easier.

The Full hyperlink is = https://www.acquisition.gov/content/part-52-solicitation-provisions-and-contract-clauses#i1063244
The link the Marco Provides = https://www.acquisition.gov/content/part-52-solicitation-provisions-and-contract-clauses


2019-01-22 18:46:36

Aylarja

Worked perfectly in Excel 2016/O365. Thanks!


2018-07-24 10:21:56

Gigi B

The information above is not helping me for some reason. I am attempting to pull hyperlinks from a main list, pull it into a sheet that is indexing certain information to another sheet that is listing information to cleaning index only those items that need to be viewed. I am having difficulty pulling the associated hyperlinks to the indexed information.


2018-04-13 08:55:58

Mike Mitchell

Thank you VERY MUCH. You saved me hours of work today. The simple custom function did a perfect job ef extracting more than 100 URLs from a spreadsheet, and I was then able to organize everything very quickly and get on with my day.


2017-11-16 00:49:43

Abahkool

Thank you!


2017-10-14 03:24:25

Greg Nottage

Hey. I'm normally pretty lazy commenting on stuff. But this tip has just saved me loads of time. Thanks!!


2017-08-09 20:34:06

mark

your macro for extracting mjltiple url's from a list saved me a TON of work. THANK YOU VERY MUCH!! ...you help very many more people than you know!!


2017-02-04 15:01:48

Mostafa Ibrahim

Thanks a lot for this tip, helped me so much, and saved a lot of time.


2016-12-19 22:01:33

Ying

Hi I would like to copy a URL website link from one cell to another. When this one cell that contains the website link is updated, I would like for all the other cells to have updated URL website links too. How can I do this?

Thanks


2016-10-10 12:59:40

LH

Thank you so much for this post. You have saved me a bunch of time. ExtractHL macro worked perfectly for me.


2016-10-03 13:20:11

Kathleen

Many thanks! A colleague painstakingly put over 100 hyperlinks in cells with shorter captions, not realizing I would have to pull them all out again to copy them out to other documents. Ran Sub ExtractHL once. Boom! Great tip.


2016-08-05 00:19:25

Thankful

Function GetURL(rng As Range) As String
On Error Resume Next
GetURL = rng.Hyperlinks(1).Address
End Function

This worked like MAGIC! thanks for being awesome!


2016-06-18 05:58:07

Willy Vanhaelen

@Rob Cooper

HL.Address truncates everything after and incuding # (hash sign). I do not see a solution to this.


2016-06-14 15:08:46

Rob Cooper

Hi,
I tried the GetUrl function, but ran into the following difficulty.
The address of the hyperlink on which I applied GetUrl is:

http://documentation.custhelp.com/euf/assets/devdocs/may2016/PolicyAutomation/en/Default.htm#Guides/Policy_Modeling_User_Guide/Walkthrough_OPM.htm

i.e. it is a particular topic in an on-line book.

GetUrl only returned
http://documentation.custhelp.com/euf/assets/devdocs/may2016/PolicyAutomation/en/Default.htm,
the address only up to the first 'htm'.

Any ideas for how to return the whole address?

Thanks.


2016-05-27 13:42:09

Rob

Thanks, you rock!


2016-05-02 13:51:45

Leonardo

Nice tip, simple and very effective.

Leonardo


2016-03-13 06:54:06

Willy Vanhaelen

FORMULATEXT is introduced in Excel 2013.
These tips apply to Excel 97 ... 2003.


2016-03-12 10:32:46

Spriteup

Or without Macro fuction just:
=MID(FORMULATEXT(B1);FIND(CHAR(34);FORMULATEXT(B1))+1;FIND(CHAR(34);FORMULATEXT(B1);FIND(CHAR(34);FORMULATEXT(B1))+1)-1-FIND(CHAR(34);FORMULATEXT(B1)))

where B1 is HYPERLINK.


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