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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.
Walter
Dropbox Staff
Dropbox StaffHey 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.
Hey, Walter! Does this syntax "%HOMEPATH%” work in Mac OS or only in Windows? It seems like a DOS syntax, will it work on my airbook as well? If so, how? When I do find and replace with this wildcard, Excel cannot find the path. The only thing that works is when, right after opening the spreadsheet on another comuter without updating the links, I replace the actual syntax without wildcards, in my case from /Users/Adam's Mac/ to /Users/AM/ and back again when I go back to my airbook from the desktop.
- Walter
I don't think it will to be honest Borq; probably due to how the Mac OS was designed to begin with as Windows' OS has a different path separator and handles UNC differently from Mac's OS.
Moreover, as I won't be able to assist further with this since it falls outside the scope of my expertise at this point, I'd suggest searching the web for a work-around as you might be able to find something useful.
I wish I could help more than this.
