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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.
What a quick reply! Thank you so much, @Walter, that's exactly what I needed to know! That makes perfect sense.
So, let me ask you something else - If I were to figure out this wildcard workaround, hyperlinks would still need to be pulled from a shared folder and the end user would need to have dropbox located in the same place as I do on my computer, correct? So, in essence, they are following the same path to get to the Dropbox file? Would this wildcard workaround be valid if the end user wanted to access the excel file from dropbox online or from a different computer than his usual?
- Walter
I don't think so StefC - wildcards such as this one can be used for accessing those Excel spreadsheets' hyperlinks to your PDF files only on Windows computers also running our desktop app, having the Dropbox Folder in the same location as you, in order to point to the exact same filepath.
Moreover, all users will have to have those PDF files stored within the same (shared) folder - it's the only way to keep the same filepath and not break the hyperlinks.
This means that if you're having your Dropbox folder located to your C drive, the other parties will also have to have their Dropbox folders located there as well.
