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Forum Discussion
Hyperlink not working in Excel
I am new to file sharing on Dropbox and am looking to use Dropbox to house an excel spreadsheet which has hyperlinks to pdf's. I emailed the spreadsheet as an attachment to my colleague direct from ...
Hey there StefC - how are you today?
Let me shed some light into this so you can have a clear view of why it's happening and you can decide if you'd like to share a folder with those PDFs with your colleague after all. Read on for more context:
In Microsoft Excel, you can create links in a workbook to another workbook or file on your computer using a formula that references an external location. When this link is created, it points to a location on your own hard drive.
When your workbook is downloaded onto another's computer, the locations that your formula points to are no longer there. The link in the workbook is looking for a specific place, for example /Your_Computer/Your_User/File, and that location is no longer accessible from a different computer.
To learn more about relative and external paths in Excel please consult the following Microsoft support page: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/328440/description-of-link-management-and-storage-in-excel
While we are unable to support you in configuring Microsoft Excel to work the way you would like, we suggest perhaps using wildcards in your formulas. Wildcards, such as "%HOMEPATH%”, if other users have the Dropbox folder located in the default location, would let you point to a location without having to worry about different usernames in the path.
I hope this information helps and please let me know if there's anything else I can do from my end to assist with this.
When I open on my desktop computer an Excel file I have created on my laptop, if the file contains links to another file in the same dropbox (different folders within the root Dropbox folder), the links don't work, even though both files are on the same Dropbox where I am the only user. I can see that this is because Excel adds the computer's hard drive name to the path (in my case this is Users/Adam's Mac/... on one computer, vs. Users/AM/... on another). But why is this even put in the path, since whenever the link is created, it should not contain anything more down the path than the first common folder, in my case .../Dropbox/... ? Or am I missing something about relative link adresses? Isn't Dropbox supposed to be the tool for sharing the same files across (own) multiple devices?
Any ideas on how to overcome this?
- Jane
Dropbox Staff
