How do I convert a column of text URLs into active hyperlinks in Excel?

Question

I have a column in excel, wherein I have all the website url values. My question is I want to turn the url values to active links. There are about 200 entries in that column

Answer 1

If adding an extra column with the hyperlinks is not an option, the alternative is to use an external editor to enclose your hyperlink into =hyperlink(" and "), in order to obtain =hyperlink("originalCellContent")

If you have Notepad++, this is a recipe you can use to perform this operation semi-automatically:

• Copy the column of addresses to Notepad++
• Keeping ALT-SHIFT pressed, extended your cursor from the top left corner to the bottom left corner, and type =hyperlink(". This adds =hyperlink(" at the beginning of each entry.
• Open "Replace" menu (Ctrl-H), activate regular expressions (ALT-G), and replace $ (end of line) with "\). This adds a closed quote and a closed parenthesis (which needs to be escaped with \ when regular expressions are activated) at the end of each line.
• Paste back the data in Excel. In practice, just copy the data and select the first cell of the column where you want the data to end up.