You can enhance your texts, present­a­tions, and emails using hy­per­links. Thanks to them, readers only need to click on the typically blue un­der­lined words or phrases to visit the ap­pro­pri­ate website.

Note

Would you like to learn how to insert hy­per­links in Office products? Read through the steps in our article on “Creating Hy­per­links”.

But sometimes after creating a hyperlink (either yourself or auto­mat­ic­ally using the program), you might prefer to have the URL as plain text: without the blue colour, un­der­lin­ing, or the clickable text. There can be many reasons for this. In some instances, you may want to simply keep the ap­pear­ance of the text con­sist­ent. Or you might wish to print out the document; the links would then not be clickable. Or the website address may only be intended as an example. If the website’s content is ir­rel­ev­ant to the context, there’s no need to link to it. In these situ­ations, it’s best not to use a hyperlink. But how can you remove a hyperlink?

How to Remove Links in Microsoft Office Documents

No matter whether you wish to delete a hyperlink in Excel or in Word, Outlook or any other Microsoft Office ap­plic­a­tion, the method is always the same. For this reason, we will show you how this works using a Microsoft Word document as an example.

  • Step 1: Click on the link using the right mouse button.
  • Step 2: Select Remove Hyperlink in the context menu.
Image: Removing a hyperlink in a Microsoft Word document
You can simply remove a link by right-clicking on it.

Removing All Links in a Word Document or Outlook Message

Imagine you have a document that contains lots of hy­per­links that you’d rather not remove one by one. Microsoft also offers a feature here – in the form of shortcuts.

  • Step 1: First, select the entire text – either by high­light­ing the area with your mouse or using the key com­bin­a­tion CTRL + ALT.
  • Step 2: Now use the key com­bin­a­tion CTRL + SHIFT + F9 to remove all the hy­per­links from the document or email.
Fact

The shift key can usually be re­cog­nised by an arrow pointing upwards. It is located above the control key.

However, from version 2010 you can also remove multiple hy­per­links in Excel using the right mouse button. This works both if you select multiple rows and if you want to remove multiple links from an in­di­vidu­al cell.

Disabling the Automatic Creation of Hy­per­links

Microsoft Office products tend to auto­mat­ic­ally create hy­per­links whenever you enter a URL. If you often include web addresses in your texts but rarely want them displayed as hy­per­links, this constant switching around can cost time and energy. For­tu­nately, you have the option to disable this automatic feature. You can do so in the Auto­Cor­rect Options under Proofing. Here, you can also configure whether you want obvious typos to be removed auto­mat­ic­ally.

  • Step 1: Go to Proofing via File and Options.
  • Step 2: Open the Auto­Cor­rect Options.
  • Step 3: Remove the checkmark for Internet and network paths with links.

Now, any URLs you enter will be displayed as simple text and the program will not auto­mat­ic­ally create a clickable hyperlink.

Image: AutoCorrect Options in Word
The Auto­Cor­rect Options enable you to prevent the automatic creation of hy­per­links.
Tip

The automatic con­ver­sion of a web address into a hyperlink actually takes two steps that the user doesn’t notice. If you reverse the last step after the con­ver­sion (via the cor­res­pond­ing button or shortcut CTRL + Z), the hyperlink will be removed but the text will be kept in the document.

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