J-Walk & Associates, Inc.

Hyperlink Misinformation

This is pretty odd. In the past month, I've received emails from three people who read this tip: Removing Or Avoiding Automatic Hyperlinks. An excerpt:

Surprisingly, Excel doesn't provide a direct way to remove all hyperlinks on a worksheet. In fact, the only way to accomplish this is one cell at a time: Activate the cell that contains the hyperlink, right-click, and then select Hyperlink, Remove Hyperlink. Unfortunately, this command is available only when you have selected a single cell. To quickly deactivate all hyperlinks, you need to use a macro.

These three people all claimed that I was wrong, and they explained to me how to remove hyperlinks from multiple cells:

1. Select the cells that have a hyperlink
2. Choose Edit - Clear - Format (or Home - Clear - Clear Formats in Excel 2007)

This command simply removes the formatting from the cells. Cells that contain a hyperlink normally appear with blue underlined text. Removing this formatting does not remove the hyperlinks.

I wonder where this advice is coming from?