How do you remove hyperlinks from a Microsoft Word document?

Question

I'm writing a VB Macro to do some processing of documents for my work. The lines of text are searched and the bracketed text is put in a list(box).

The problem comes when I want to remove all hyperlinks in the document and then generate new ones (not necessarily in the location of the original hyperlinks)

So the problem is How do I remove the existing hyperlinks?

My current issue is that every time a link gets added, the hyperlinks count goes up one, but when you delete it, the count does NOT reduce. (as a result I now have a document with 32 links - all empty except for 3 I put in myself - they do not show up in the document)

At the end of the code are my attempts at removing the hyperlinks.

Private Sub FindLinksV3_Click()

    ListOfLinks.Clear

    ListOfLinks.AddItem Now
    ListOfLinks.AddItem ("Test String 1")

    ListOfLinks.AddItem ActiveDocument.FullName

    SentenceCount = ActiveDocument.Sentences.Count
    ListOfLinks.AddItem ("Sentence Count:" & SentenceCount)
    counter = 0

    For Each myobject In ActiveDocument.Sentences    ' Iterate through each element.
        ListOfLinks.AddItem myobject
        counter = counter + 1

        BracketStart = (InStr(1, myobject, "("))

        If BracketStart > 0 Then
            BracketStop = (InStr(1, myobject, ")"))

            If BracketStop > 0 Then
                ListOfLinks.AddItem Mid$(myobject, BracketStart + 1, BracketStop - BracketStart - 1)

                ActiveDocument.Sentences(counter).Select

                ActiveDocument.Hyperlinks.Add Anchor:=Selection.Range, Address:= _
                "http://testnolink/" & counter, ScreenTip:=""  'TextToDisplay:=""

            End If
        End If
    Next

    'ActiveDocument.Sentences(1).Select
    '
    'Selection.Range.Hyperlinks(1).Delete

    ActiveDocument.Hyperlinks.Item(1).Delete

    Debug.Print ActiveDocument.Hyperlinks.Count

End Sub

Answer 1

This is an old post, so am adding this VBA code in case it is useful to someone.

Hyperlinks (Collections) need to be deleted in reverse order:

Sub RemoveHyperlinksInDoc()
    ' You need to delete collection members starting from the end going backwards
    With ActiveDocument
        For i = .Hyperlinks.Count To 1 Step -1
            .Hyperlinks(i).Delete
        Next
    End With 
End Sub

Sub RemoveHyperlinksInRange()
    ' You need to delete collection members starting from the end going backwards
    With Selection.Range
        For i = .Hyperlinks.Count To 1 Step -1
            .Hyperlinks(i).Delete
        Next
    End With    
End Sub

Answer 2

The line removing the hyperlink is commented out. The following line will remove the first hyperlink within the selected range:

Selection.Range.Hyperlinks(1).Delete

This will also decrement Selection.Range.Hyperlinks.Count by 1.

To see how the count of links is changing you can run the following method on a document:

Sub AddAndRemoveHyperlink()

    Dim oRange As Range
    Set oRange = ActiveDocument.Range
    oRange.Collapse wdCollapseStart
    oRange.MoveEnd wdCharacter

    Debug.Print ActiveDocument.Range.Hyperlinks.Count

    ActiveDocument.Hyperlinks.Add oRange, "http://www.example.com"
    Debug.Print ActiveDocument.Range.Hyperlinks.Count

    ActiveDocument.Hyperlinks.Item(1).Delete
    Debug.Print ActiveDocument.Range.Hyperlinks.Count

End Sub