Make My Links Live in Excel

If you’ve ever imported large quantities of URLs into a spreadsheet, or even copy/pasted just a few rows, one of the things that you’ve probably disliked is the fact that those URLs are not “live”.

In fact, in order to actually visit those URLs as needed, you have to copy/paste each one of them into the browser address bar, which takes extra time.

You may have engaged in the ridiculous process of double clicking into each cell and then pressing the enter key. This moves your cursor down the spread sheet line after line, making each URL miraculously “live”. I’ve even had my 11 year old son do this for hundreds of rows before.

You would THINK that Microsoft would be “smart” enough to make these URLs immediately live upon entry, but sadly; that’s not the case. Even with http:// before the URL, Excel simply cannot understand that it should be a link.

A couple of weeks ago, I gave a presentation at the Oregon Computer Consultants Association meeting, where I was reviewing some of the things I hate about office 2007, and the Excel Queen Karen Westermann seemed to think this would be an easy problem to solve.

Well apparently, it wasn’t quite as easy as she thought it would be. Since she’s the Queen though, she did come up with a solution, so here’s a spreadsheet for this miserable task that I can share with you all.

The Make my links live tool is available now, complete with directions here. My son doesn’t like it though, since he’s now out of a job…