Excel Hyperlink

Hyperlinks In Excel

Hyperlinks in Excel provide a way for the author to link the reader to a supplementary resource. This resource can be a document stored in the following places:

• on a network server
• on the intranet
• on the internet

The Structure Of An Excel Hyperlink

To insert a hyperlink into a cell, you would type the following:

=HYPERLINK(link_location,visible_text)

Doing so will create a clickable link in the cell. You may recognise the '=' at the start of the hyperlink from the format used for formulas in Excel. The link_location variable is the path and file name to the document to be opened, and is typed in as plain text. If you are specifying a location on your network, it may look something like this:

P:\Sales\2009\Joe_Smith.xls

Similarly internet locations will look something like this:

http://www.msexcel07.com/Sales.xlsx

The visible_text variable is the text that will display in the cell. It is displayed in blue with an underline, as this is the default styling for hyperlinks on web pages. If the visible text is ommitted, then the cell will display the link_location instead. For example you might like the hyperlink to display the text "View Sales" and link to the URL given above:

=HYPERLINK("http://www.msexcel07.com/Sales.xlsx","View Sales")

Note the quotation marks around each variable.

The hyperlink location may even be another cell in your worksheet. For example, if cell C5 contains the URL given earlier, we may structure the Excel hyperlink like this:

=HYPERLINK(C5,"View Sales")

Clicking on the View Sales hyperlink will open up the Excel spreadsheet referred to in the same way that the previous example did.

More Notes On The Hyperlink Location

The hyperlink location may also refer to a place in a document such as a specific cell in an Excel spreadsheet, a bookmark in a Word document or a named anchor on a web page. If the location specified in the hyperlink does not exist, an error will appear when you click the cell.

You may have run into difficulties if you've tried to make the cell active to change its contents as clicking on the cell activates the link and you end up jumping to the linked location! There is an easy way around this: click and hold on the cell until the cursor changes to a cross. The cell is then active and editable.

Examples Of Excel Hyperlinks

To give you a feel for what you can achieve in Excel with hyperlinks, here are a few examples.

1. =HYPERLINK("[http://www.msexcel07.com/Sales.xlsx]January!A6", E5)

   the worksheet called January is opened in the workbook Sales.xlsx. Cell A6 becomes the active cell there and the visible text is taken from cell E5 in the worksheet in which the hypelink appears.

2. =HYPERLINK("\\SALES\Statements\2009Sales.xls", E6)

   In Excel for Windows, the following example displays the contents of cell E6 as the visible text in the cell and opens the file named 2009Sales.xls, which is stored on the server named SALES in the Statements share.