Stop Automatic Hyperlinks in Excel

The Very Scary Fall Giveaway for Excel Nerds is going strong, with lots of frightening Excel horror stories and some scary costume ideas. Please take a few minutes to read the comments, and add your contribution.

In the annoying, but not scary category, I've been entering network paths in Excel, and they turn into hyperlinks when I press Enter. Sometimes that's a helpful feature, but in this case it makes it hard to go back and edit the cell.

Turn Off Hyperlink Creation

If you don't want hyperlinks created automatically, you can turn the feature off.

To turn the hyperlink option off in Excel 2007:

• Click the Office Button, then click Excel Options
  
• Click the Proofing category, and click the AutoCorrect Options button
  
• Select the AutoFormat As You Type tab
  
• Remove the check mark from Internet and network paths with hyperlinks
  
• Click OK, twice, to close the dialog boxes

To turn the hyperlink option off in Excel 2002 or Excel 2003:

• On the Tools menu, choose AutoCorrect Options
  
• Select the AutoFormat as you type tab
  
• Remove the check mark from Internet and network paths with hyperlinks
  
• Click OK

Remove a Hyperlink Manually

If you want to leave the hyperlink feature on, you can undo the hyperlink immediately after it's created.

To manually remove the hyperlink:

• Type the email address and press Enter
  
• Immediately, press Ctrl+Z.

This is a shortcut for Undo, and will convert the hyperlink back to text.

Remove Selected Hyperlinks Programmatically

To change a group of cells that contain hyperlinks, you can use the following code.  It deletes all the hyperlinks in the selected cells.

Sub delHyperlinks()

Dim myCell As Range

For Each myCell In Selection

   myCell.Hyperlinks.Delete

Next myCell

End Sub

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