by In this short article, I'll show you how you can quickly remove all unwanted hyperlinks from an Excel worksheet at once and prevent their occurrence in the future. The solution works in all Excel versions starting from Excel 2003 through modern Excel 2021 and desktop Excel included in Microsoft 365.
Every time you type an e-mail address or URL in a cell, Excel automatically converts it into a clickable hyperlink. From my experience, this behavior is annoying rather than helpful :-(
So after typing a new email to my table or editing a URL and pressing Enter, I usually press Ctrl+Z to remove the hyperlink that Excel automatically created…
First I'll show how you can delete all accidently created unnecessary hyperlinks, and then how you can configure your Excel to turn off the Auto-Hyperlinking feature.
Remove multiple hyperlinks in all Excel versions
In Excel 2000-2007, there is no built-in function to delete multiple hyperlinks at a time, only one by one. Here is a simple trick that lets you overcome this limitation, of course, the trick works in Excel 2019, 2016, and 2013 too.
- Select any empty cell outside your table.
- Type 1 to this cell.
- Copy this cell (Ctrl+C).
- Select your columns with Hyperlinks: click on any cell with data in the 1st column and press Ctrl+Space to select the whole column:
- If you want to select more than 1 column at a time: after selecting the 1s column, hold Ctrl, click on any cell in the 2nd column and press Space to select all cells in the 2nd column without losing selection in 1st column.
- Right-click on any selected cells and select "Paste Special" from the context menu:
- In the "Paste Special" dialog box, select the "Multiply" radio button in the "Operation" section:
- Click Ok. All hyperlinks are removed :-)
How to delete all hyperlinks in 2 clicks (Excel 2021 – 2010)
In Excel 2010, Microsoft finally added the ability to remove multiple hyperlinks at a time:
- Select the entire column with Hyperlinks: click on any cell with data and press Ctrl+Space.
- Right-click on any selected cell and select "Remove hyperlinks" from the context menu.
Note: If you select a single cell, then this menu item changes to "Remove hyperlink", a nice example of usability :-(
- All hyperlinks are removed from the column :-)
Disable automatic creation of hyperlinks in Excel
- In Excel 2007, click the Office button -> Excel Options.
In Excel 2010 - 2019, navigate to the File Tab -> Options. - In the "Excel Options" dialog box, switch to the "Proofing" tab in the left column and click the "AutoCorrect Options" button:
- In the "AutoCorrect Options" dialog box, switch to the "AutoFormat As You Type" tab and uncheck the "Internet and network paths with hyperlinks" checkbox.
- Click OK twice to close both dialogs and return to your Excel worksheet.
Now, type any URL or email to any cell - Excel retains the plain text format :-)
When you really need to create a hyperlink, simply press Ctrl+K to open the "Insert Hyperlink" dialog box.
81 comments
None of the suggested method in the article worked
@Alain Dekker, you are one ungrateful moron
Very helpful, thank you!
Cool, thanks!
Thank you so much. You help me with one of my biggest problems on excel
I have Excel 2007.
The only thing that works for me is cut paste into Notepad to clean formatting and then paste it again into Excel.
Because I sometimes don't want to delete ALL hyperlinks from the sheet, only some.
Insert a new, blank worksheet. Copy the entire worksheet cells that have those irritating hyperlinks (the hyperlinks in my Excel worksheet were the result of pasting from a table from a web page.) Then Paste Special and select Values.
If I had Pasted Special - Values when I pasted the data from the web page I would have avoided the problem but now the hyperlinks on a web page are not always obvious.
Thanks for your help! The external links were annoying me. Thank you so much!
One more tip. After doing the multiply trick under paste special any empty cells will now have zeros in them. That's not handy. However if you then press it will "undo" the multiplication, but leave all the hyperlinks as regular text.
If you got 0 in all cells, you made another kind of mistake. The instructions given worked like a charm.
In Excel 2003, a variation of his idea also worked for me:
1. CTRL + A to "Select All"
2. Right-click and select "Copy"
3. Right-click and select "Paste"
Didn't work for me as well. rather in all empty cells i had 0.
To turn off creating hyperlinks as you type in Excel 2003 go to:
Tools --> AutoCorrect Options --> Auto Format As You Type Tab
unselect the check box for "Internet and network paths with hyperlinks"
Now as you enter data in to Excel it will not create a hyperlink.
Awesome. Can't thank you enough.
Thanks a lot....
Nice,
its working.
Thanks
This was an AWESOME fix! I'm preparing an Excel spreadsheet for an appeal mailing and wondered what I was going to do. Removing the hyperlinks individually would have taken a very long time. Thank you so much!
Another happy customer! Thank You :)
THANK YOU! VERY annoying when selecting a cell and having it open a link. I used your "all versions" method and the first time with "multiply" it made Excel do a bunch of operations, flashing screen and crashed after about 10 seconds (I'd saved file before trying) and had to close Excel and restart. Not sure why.
Instead of trying "paste multiply" a second time, I typed "1" into a cell, selected it to copy, then "paste special" using "add" and POOF - instantly cleared 50 hyperlinks. It reset the colored cell to white, but that was easy to fix.
Again, THANK YOU - been dealing with this for years... never would have thought to try such a thing.
Thank you very much.
It was very annoying and time wasting.
Regards.
Just use =proper.
That's it