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Hyperlinks Not Working In Excel 2016

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Note

Office 365 ProPlus is being renamed to Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise. For more information about this change, read this blog post.

After a user inserts a hyperlink to a file residing on a network mapped drive within an Office product, the hyperlink's text displays the network mapped drive path, however the link is resolved as the UNC path. For example, in Excel if you go to Insert, and then click on Hyperlink the user is prompted to select the file. If that is not the problem, you may want to turn off an option in Excel that causes the program to check hyperlinks whenever the workbook is saved. (There have been some reports that Excel disables the links a bit too early sometimes, which could be the behavior that Fanie is seeing.). It seems to be happening on all of our spreadsheets with dropbox URLs, but only dropbox URLs. Other non-dropbox URLs work. What’s interesting is that when I simply copy the URL address from excel’s hyperlink window and paste it directly into a web browser, the Dropbox file opens without a problem.

Symptoms

Hyperlink not working in excel 2016

After a user inserts a hyperlink to a file residing on a network mapped drive within an Office product, the hyperlink's text displays the network mapped drive path, however the link is resolved as the UNC path.

For example, in Excel if you go to Insert, and then click on Hyperlink the user is prompted to select the file. If the user navigates to a file residing on a Network Mapped Drive, and inserts a hyperlink to that file, the hyperlink will be created to the file via its UNC path instead of its network mapped drive path. After the link has been inserted, the user can then hover over the link and see that the full UNC path has been used when creating the link to the file.

Cause

HyperlinksLinks

The cause is due to the way Office creates hyperlinks to files. Office products will create links to files using the UNC path and will not use the network mapped drive location, even if it displays it in the hyperlink text.

Resolution

Hyperlinks Not Working In Excel 2016Hyperlinks Not Working In Excel 2016

There is no resolution for this. Microsoft recommends that users insert hyperlinks using the UNC path to prevent confusion in cases where opening a file via UNC or network mapped drive might make a difference in the expected behavior in the file.

More Information

An example of where how a file is opened can be found listed in this KB article under the section 'Scenarios that may cause links to not work as expected.'

328440 Description of link management and storage in Excel