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Excel Links Not Working

Links

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.

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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.

Text cannot link. The link is instead created in the cell, even though I highlighted the text and chose the 'insert link' icon, after selecting 'Apply,' the text does not appear linked. The cell in the spreadsheet can be linked, but the text itself does not appear linked. I am not having an issue with HYPERLINKS. They are LINKS to other excel files, external data. In Excel 2013 if i go to File i see EDIT LINKS TO FILES on the right hand side. Hope this helps, sorry i am not a excel guru. I did try the link you provided and it was no help to me.

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.

  • Reasons for Hyperlinks Not Working in Excel Issue Old Hyperlinked Worksheet Name Hyperlinks help you view related information in multiple locations, including your computer network and the internet.
  • Highlight and delete all files beginning with external links. Amend the file extension to the original.xlsx (or in my case.xlsm) Open spreadsheet in Excel – choose to repair sheet. Save and enjoy an unlinked spreadsheet. The only problem with this technique is that its quite a blunt tool and will remove all external links.
  • Re: Tool to auto fix broken excel links after migration to SharePoint online. You can try our tool = ReplaceMagic (check: www.replacemagic.com ). In recent months almost 70% of migrations that we are supporting are to SharePoint.Online with all possible documents types (yes, changes in Excel will also work).

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.

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.

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