Working with hyperlinks in Excel

A view at a glance

Actual management system documents are relying on excel files. By using hyperlinks you can help users to easily access different sections of the document by simply jumping to them, instead of wasting their time by searching for the information needed.

This material is intended for management systems professionals who want to implement standard requirements by using excel friendly-user forms and need a quick solution for certain tasks.

Steps to implement navigation within a documents

In this material, I will focus on Microsoft Excel, but the concept is similar for other products. The concept behind is similar to HTML therefore I will present the concepts by using HTML-specific terms - anchor and hyperlink.

1. Create anchor for the target cell
2. Create hyperlink to the anchor

Create anchor for the target cell (1)

To create an anchor to the target cell you have to select the cell, click on the cell address in the top left textbox then rename the cell:

Create hyperlink to the anchor (2)

To create the hyperlink to the defined anchor, you will:

1. Select the cell where the hyperlink will be created
2. On the Insert tab, in the Links group, click Link or
   • Press CTRL & K same time.

A dialogue box appears to define the link:

The dialog box contains two important fields:

Text to display: write there the text you want to be displayed in the cell where the link will be included.

Address: the hyperlink address

To direct the user to the anchor previously defined you have to go to the left side of the window and click on Place in this document button. Then, select the anchor:

In the end press OK and you have your hyperlink to the target section of the document.