Excel: Prevent Conversion of URLs into Hyperlinks

Excel automatically converts URLs into hyperlinks. By following these steps, you prevent this from happening. Additionally, the process for converting URLs back to text is discussed.

I frequently keep track of various web stats in Excel worksheets. In this data a lot of web addresses are included. Microsoft Excel, like most Office programs, automatically coverts text that appears to be an URL into a hyperlink. Although it is nice in certain circumstances to be able to jump directly to the web page in my browser from within Excel, most of the times the hyperlinks are simply annoying.

Throughout the entire history of Excel including Windows version 2003, 2007, 2013 and modern Mac versions 2008 and 2011, this hyperlink conversion can be blocked.

During manual text insertion, you can prevent text that contains a URL from being converted to hypertext by prefacing the text with an apostrophe.

For example, http://www.microsoft.com would be converted to a hyperlink while ‘http://www.microsoft.com is not. The initial apostrophe does not show on your spreadsheet.

If you forget this tip and Excel converts your URL to a hyperlink, you can correct this through the following steps:

1. Right-click on the URL
2. Select Remove Hyperlink from the menu that appears

Sometimes you need to remove all the hyperlinks from a document in bulk. Selecting and editing each text box through the above methods would just be too painful.

We have created a bulk macro to remove all hyperlinks if you need to convert a large amount of hyperlinks at once.