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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.
I had this same issue and looked up MS Office help for the solution - the wild card solution didn't work for me as we have many Dropbox users who have different folder structures, etc. I simply use the 'copy Dropbox link' from either File Explorer or the web Dropbox, paste into the cell of Excel that I want another user to use to obtain/view the file (either PDF or Word/Excel/etc) and then press 'tab' to make the hyperlink 'live' and the link then takes the user to the Dropbox website version of the file or folder (which ever link is required). I have found you cannot create a hyperlink using the dialog box of Office/insert link/insert hyperlink because it takes you to the path used by your own system, ie Drive D in my case, even if you point it to 'existing file or webpage' within this dialog box.
I have done some more research and the attached works for me and my team. Believe me, we are all inexperienced when using Dropbox, especially some members of my team.
