Excel Links Not Working

16-11-2021
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  1. On the Insert tab, in the Links group, click Link. You can also right-click the cell or object and then click Link on the shortcut menu, or you can press Ctrl+K. Under Link to, click Existing File or Web Page. Do one of the following: To select a file, click Current Folder, and then click the file that you want to link to.
  2. Troubleshooting for “Excel Hyperlinks not working” doesn’t involve much time but there is a possibility that what you get is not as expected, meaning the hyperlinks are not repaired. Stellar Repair for Excel lets you perform Hyperlink repair, scan and save the result in all new Excel file, without interfering with worksheet properties.
  3. In the Excel Options dialog box, click Proofing from the left pane, and click AutoCorrect Options in the right section. See screenshot: 3. And then in the AutoCorrect dialog, click AutoFormat As You Type tab, and uncheck I nternet and network paths with hyperlinks option under Replace as you type section, see screenshot: 4.
  4. This does not work! What will work is where you have turned off the Excel setting /options/formulas/'Use table names in formulas'. The external named range will need to be deleted and re-setup with this setting turned off.

A client called me asking for help with a problem on one of their Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. They were creating content for their new website that I was in the process of building and wanted to include bookmarks to content they had already created on the site.

SharePoint Online Excel Web Access - links not working In my organisation we have set up several Excel Web Access pages on SharePoint 2010 (on premises), and on these we frequently use the =HYPERLINK formula to single cells in order to navigate around different parts of the workbook.

Excel links not working in sharepoint

Whenever they clicked on a link in their spreadsheet, they received an error “Unable to open <url>. Cannot download the information you requested”. They also tried doing it in Microsoft Word, but received a similar error.

I had them send me the spreadsheet and Word document – I don’t use Microsoft Office, but I do have the readers installed. Strangely enough, I got exactly the same error – which was very perplexing considering that the link itself was completely valid and worked in my browser.

I had them create some test links to other website and found that these worked without a problem. This proved to be a major clue to the problem – it seemed related to the website I was building rather than a problem in Word or anything else.

Excel

After a bit of Googling I found a technote that explained that the Office programs will attempt to access the link first before forwarding the URL to your browser to load the web page. If there is an error returned from the website for that URL, Word or Excel will refuse to load it.

Excel Links Not Working

On closer inspection I found that web pages on the site I was developing were indeed returning 404 errors. I had set up a basic layer of security prior to site launch by including a conditional in the header template of the WordPress site which checked to see if the user was logged in to WordPress as an editor or administrator, and if not – display an error message explaining the site was coming soon.

Working

The wp_die function I was calling returned a 404 HTTP code to the browser when it output the error message – which is all that Word or Excel could get from the site – thus they believed (correctly) that the URLs were (currently) invalid. When I turned off the security to test it, the links in Word and Excel worked as expected.

The real problem was that Word and Excel provided less than meaningful error messages – if they had just forwarded the request to access the URL to a browser, we would have seen the meaningful error message from the website and worked out what was happening immediately.

Tags: Excel; Microsoft; Windows; Word