Opening Sites in a Browser

Steve has a range of cells (A1:A10) that contain website addresses—for example, www.example.com. He wonders if it is possible, within a macro, to open each of these addresses in a browser all at once in separate browser tabs.

There are a couple of ways you can approach this task, and which one you choose depends largely on the nature of the data in your worksheet. If the cells contain active hyperlinks (ones that if you click on them, the address is opened in a browser), then you can use a rather simple macro:

Sub FollowHyperlinks1()
    Dim MyRange As Range
    Dim hl As Hyperlink

    On Error Resume Next
    Set MyRange = Range("A1:A10")
    For Each hl In MyRange.Hyperlinks
        hl.Follow
    Next hl
End Sub

The macro simply looks at all the hyperlinks in the range of A1:A10 and uses the Follow method to open each of them in your default browser. Because of the way in which your operating system transfers information from Excel to your browser, it is a good idea to have your browser open before you run the macro. The reason for this is because, in testing, we found that you may actually end up with two instances of the browser open, with some addresses open in one instance and some in the other. This apparently occurs because of the delay in opening the first instance of the browser. If the browser is open before the macro is run, then there is no delay and each address opens in a different tab of the same browser instance.

If the addresses in your worksheet may not be active hyperlinks, then you can't rely upon using the Hyperlinks collection for the range. Instead, you need to look at the value of each cell in the range:

Sub FollowHyperlinks2()
    Dim MyRange As Range
    Dim cell As Range
    Dim sTemp As String

    On Error Resume Next
    Set MyRange = Range("A1:A10")
    For Each cell In MyRange
        sTemp = cell.Value
        ThisWorkbook.FollowHyperlink _
          Address:=sTemp
    Next cell
End Sub

This approach uses the FollowHyperlink method to load the address in the sTemp variable. In this case, it doesn't matter whether the contents of the cells are active hyperlinks or not; the code still tries to open them in a browser.

Finally, if your data may not contain fully qualified addresses, then you'll need to use a different approach, still. For instance, Steve mentioned having addresses such as www.example.com in the worksheet, but such an address will not work with the examples so far. If your data is missing http:// at the beginning (or some variant, such as https://), then the code won't open the address in the browser. In your data has this peculiarity, then a slight modification to the macro is in order:

Sub FollowHyperlinks3()
    Dim MyRange As Range
    Dim cell As Range
    Dim sTemp As String

    On Error Resume Next
    Set MyRange = Range("A1:A10")
    For Each cell In MyRange
        sTemp = cell.Value
        If InStr(sTemp, "://") = 0 Then
            sTemp = "http://" & sTemp
        End If
        ThisWorkbook.FollowHyperlink _
          Address:=sTemp
    Next cell
End Sub

Note that this example examines the contents of sTemp to see if it has the characters "://" within it. If not, then the prefix http:// is added to the cell contents and Excel tries to use the FollowHyperlink method to open the modified address.

ExcelTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Excel training. This tip (11413) 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: Opening Sites in a Browser.