How to Remove Hyperlink in Excel

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Issues when Working with Hyperlinks in Excel

When you have some hyperlinks in your worksheet, you may feel some level of frustration dealing with it (at least I do).

Below are some of the issues you can face when you have hyperlinks in your workbook:

1. It’s difficult to select, copy, and delete cells containing hyperlinks. This is because when you click on the cell, Excel opens up your default browser and directly takes you to that link. This can feel more like unsolicited assistance and waste a lot of time. There is one way around this though. You can click on the cell and hold your mouse button till the pointer turns into a plus symbol. But this slows you down and is not helpful at all when you’re trying to get important work done.
2. Say you find an error in the URL of a website in one of the cells. To change or correct it, you need to double click the contents of the cell. This becomes really difficult when Excel marks the contents as a hyperlink.
3. If Excel sees any content that looks like a URL, email address, or file location, it automatically converts it into a hyperlink, even if that link doesn’t actually exist. This could mislead someone else going through your spreadsheet.

For all the above cases, the best solution would be to either remove the hyperlinks, so the cell contents behave and look like regular text, or to disable automatic hyperlink conversions altogether.

In this tutorial, we are going to look at how you can remove hyperlinks from a single cell, multiple cells, and a whole worksheet.

We will also show you how to disable Excel from automatically converting anything to a hyperlink.

Remove multiple hyperlinks in all Excel versions

In Excel 2000-2007, there is no built-in function to delete multiple hyperlinks at a time, only one by one. Here is a simple trick that lets you overcome this limitation, of course, the trick works in Excel 2019, 2016, and 2013 too.

• Select any empty cell outside your table.
• Type 1 to this cell.
• Copy this cell (Ctrl+C).
• Select your columns with Hyperlinks: click on any cell with data in the 1st column and press Ctrl+Space to select the whole column:
  
• If you want to select more than 1 column at a time: after selecting the 1s column, hold Ctrl, click on any cell in the 2nd column and press Space to select all cells in the 2nd column without losing selection in 1st column.
• Right-click on any selected cells and select “Paste Special” from the context menu:
  
• In the “Paste Special” dialog box, select the “Multiply” radio button in the “Operation” section:
  
• Click Ok. All hyperlinks are removed 🙂
  

How to delete all hyperlinks in 2 clicks (Excel 2019 – 2010)

In Excel 2010, Microsoft finally added the ability to remove multiple hyperlinks at a time:

• Select the entire column with Hyperlinks: click on any cell with data and press Ctrl+Space.
• Right-click on any selected cell and select “Remove hyperlinks” from the context menu. Note: If you select a single cell, then this menu item changes to “Remove hyperlink”, a nice example of usability 🙁
  
• All hyperlinks are removed from the column 🙂
  

Disable automatic creation of hyperlinks in Excel

So far we have been treating the symptoms.

Now let’s see how to target the root cause of the issue – URLs/Emails automatically getting converted into hyperlinks.

The reason this happens as there is a setting in Excel that automatically converts ‘Internet and network paths’ into hyperlinks.

Here are the steps to disable this setting in Excel:

1. Go to File.
2. Click on Options.
3. In the Excel Options dialog box, click on ‘Proofing’ in the left pane.
4. Click on the AutoCorrect Options button.
5. In the AutoCorrect dialog box, select the ‘AutoFormat As You Type’ tab.
6. Uncheck the option – ‘Internet and network paths with hyperlinks’
7. Click OK.
8. Close the Excel Options dialog box.

Clear Hyperlinks Without Changing Format Settings

If you would rather retain the formatting when removing hyperlinks, there’s another technique:

1. Select the cells you want to work on. You can select a single cell, group of cells, or the entire worksheet.
2. Under the Home tab, you will find the Clear option in the ‘Editing’ group. Click on it and select “Clear Hyperlinks” from the dropdown list.
3. When you do this, you will see a pink eraser icon. If you had selected a group of cells, the eraser should appear at the bottom right corner of your selection. If you had selected the entire worksheet, it should appear at the top right corner of your sheet.
4. Click on this eraser icon. You will see a drop-down list with two options:
   • Clear Hyperlinks only
   • Clear Hyperlinks and Formats
5. If you click on “Clear Hyperlinks only”, your hyperlinks will be removed, but formatting will remain intact. However, if you click on “Clear Hyperlinks and Formats”, it will remove both the hyperlinks as well as any formatting applied to those cells.

Note that hyperlinks automatically get a format where the text is blue with an underline. When you use the above method, it will remove the hyperlink, but it will not remove any formatting, including the blue text and underline.

So it may look as if there are hyperlinks in the cell, but it’s just the formatting.

Related: How to Extract URL from Hyperlinks in Excel (Using VBA Formula)

Remove hyperlinks with a VBA Macro

If you need to work with hyperlinks quite often and are comfortable using VB macros, you can create a simple macro script to do this..

To remove hyperlinks from a selection, here’s the code that you can use:

Sub RemoveSelectedHyperlinks()
Selection.Hyperlinks.Delete
End Sub

Follow these steps:

1. Select the range of cells for which you want to remove hyperlinks.
2. From the Developer Menu Ribbon, select Visual Basic.
3. Once your VBA window opens, Click Insert->Module. Now you can start coding. Type or copy-paste the above lines of code into the module window:
4. Run the macro by navigating to Developer->Macros->RemoveSelectedHyperlinks->Run or just clicking the button.
5. When you go back to your spreadsheet, you will find the selected all hyperlinks removed from the selection.

To remove hyperlinks from the entire sheet, you can use the following code:

Sub RemoveAllHyperlinks()
ActiveSheet.Hyperlinks.Delete
End Sub

Since you want to work on the entire sheet you don’t need to make any selections. Just make sure the sheet you want to apply the code on is the active sheet.

Follow these steps:

1. From the Developer Menu Ribbon, select Visual Basic.
2. Once your VBA window opens, Click Insert->Module. Now you can start coding. Type or copy-paste the above lines of code into the module window:
3. Run the macro by navigating to Developer->Macros-> RemoveAllHyperlinks ->Run or just clicking the button.
4. When you go back to your spreadsheet, you will find all hyperlinks removed from the entire sheet.

Once your VBScript is ready and working, you can link this to a macro button and add it to your quick access toolbar.

Here’s how to do this:

1. Click on the Customize Quick Access Toolbar dropdown. You will find it at the top of your Excel window.
2. Click on “More Commands”
3. This will open the Excel Options dialog box.
4. Click on the drop-down list below “Choose Commands From” and select the “Macros” option.
5. Select the name of the macro you created. In our case, it’s either ‘ThisWorkbook.RemoveSelectedHyperlinks’ or ‘ThisWorkbook.RemoveAllHyperlinks’.
6. Click on the Add>> button.
7. Click OK.

This will create a Quick Access macro button for you and place it on your Quick Access Toolbar, so whenever you click it, your macro can run and remove all your required hyperlinks.

In this way, you can get your hyperlinks removed even faster, with just one click.

Note: Running this macro will remove all your hyperlinks permanently, so you will not be able to reverse the changes even by using the Undo command.

Conclusion

Remove Hyperlink in Excel by Removing Hyperlink in Word The hyperlink is an effective way to connect you with your document or its outside contents. You can facilitate this link to other documents inside the same folder or store the hyperlink externally in order to connect your document with various other items in the outside world.