by Alexander Frolov, updated on
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.
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.
In Excel 2010, Microsoft finally added the ability to remove multiple hyperlinks at a time:
Note: If you select a single cell, then this menu item changes to "Remove hyperlink", a nice example of usability :-(
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.
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