Chapter 29: Using Hyperlinks

Overview

Workbooks seldom live in isolation. The material you manipulate in a Microsoft Office Excel 2007 document is related to other material elsewhere-on the Internet, on a file server, in another Office Excel 2007 document, or perhaps in your collection of digital photography. Just as hyperlinks on Web sites link related information on other Web sites, hyperlinks in your Excel workbooks can connect the various threads of your professional life.

Hyperlinks in Excel can look like text hyperlinks in Web pages. That is, a hyperlink can be a simple word or phrase, underlined and colored to distinguish it from other text in your workbook. After you click such a link, the color ordinarily changes, marking that you've already visited the link's target.

Just as links on Web pages can be attached to graphics as well as text, so can they in Excel. You can assign them to drawing objects or charts, as well as to ordinary worksheet cells.

Here's a short inventory of useful tasks you can perform with hyperlinks in Excel:

• Link to Web sites You'll find the ability to link to Web pages particularly useful if you use Excel to generate material on the Web. When you post your Excel document to your Web server, you can already have the appropriate links to related pages in place.

• Link to other existing documents Let's say you're a realtor with a worksheet that summarizes your current listings portfolio. You have pictures of each house, but the pictures don't fit neatly into worksheet cells. Create hyperlinks to the pictures instead. You can assign the hyperlinks to cells containing the multiple listing service numbers or street addresses. Or suppose you're looking for a way to catalog your digital photo collection. Although you can use file and folder names to describe photo contents, dates, or locations, Excel limits how much information you can supply in a file name. Consider setting up an Excel table instead, with hyperlinks from descriptive information to individual photo files.

• Link to a document that doesn't yet exist Excel will create the document when you click the link.

• Link to another place in the current document Perhaps you've built a complete worksheet for someone else to use. You can help that person navigate your document by supplying a table of hyperlinks.

• Link to an e-message You can create a contact list in Excel and link each name to the person's e-mail address. When you click the link, Excel launches your default e-mail program, with the message already addressed.

• Link to a network path You can make it easy for yourself or other users of your workbooks to connect to a file-server location by entering a UNC path to that location in a worksheet cell. Excel will recognize the address as a network path and create a hyperlink. Clicking the hyperlink opens the network folder in Windows Explorer.