Changing Huge Numbers of Hyperlinks

Wendy has a single Excel worksheet that contains over 1,200 hyperlinks to TIFF files. (These are hyperlinks, not regular links.) Excel hiccupped and had to shut down, so Emily used the AutoSaved files to recover the previously saved file. Now all the previously working hyperlinks don't work. She had the hyperlinks to the images on a shared network drive, but the AutoSave changed the hyperlinks to reference the C: drive. She wonders if there is an easy way to fix them back to the shared network drive.

At first blush it might seem that you could use Excel's regular Find and Replace feature to find the hard drive designation (as in file://c:) and replace it with a network drive (as in file://shareddrive). The problem is that this approach only addresses part of the problem—it only changes the displayed portion of the hyperlink, not the underlying hyperlink itself. The only way you can get to the hyperlink itself is through the use of a macro.

Assuming that all the hyperlinks that need changing are on the same worksheet, then you can use the following macro:

Sub FixHyperlinks1()
    Dim wks As Worksheet
    Dim hl As Hyperlink
    Dim sOld As String
    Dim sNew As String

    Set wks = ActiveSheet
    sOld = "c:\" 
    sNew = "S:\Network\"
    For Each hl In wks.Hyperlinks
        hl.Address = Replace(hl.Address, sOld, sNew)
    Next hl
End Sub

All you need to do is change the values assigned to the sOld and sNew variables. If you get an error when you try to run the macro—an error with the line containing the Replace function—it is because the Replace function isn't available in all versions of Excel. In that case you should use the following macro, instead:

Sub FixHyperlinks2()
    Dim wks As Worksheet
    Dim hl As Hyperlink
    Dim sOld As String
    Dim sNew As String

    Set wks = ActiveSheet
    sOld = "c:\" 
    sNew = "S:\Network\"
    For Each hl In wks.Hyperlinks
        hl.Address = Application.WorksheetFunction. _
            Substitute(hl.Address, sOld, sNew)
    Next hl
End Sub

Note that the only difference is the use of the Substitute worksheet function.

ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (8622) 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: Changing Huge Numbers of Hyperlinks.