You may have discovered that Excel 2000 supports automatic cell hyperlinks. Whenever you type something that resembles a URL or an e-mail address into a cell, this feature automatically converts the text into a clickable hyperlink. But what if you don't want to create a hyperlink?

I have not yet unearthed a way to turn off Excel's automatic hyperlink feature, but you can override it. If Excel creates a hyperlink from your cell entry, click the Undo button (or press <Ctrl>-Z) to restore the cell's contents to normal text.

Surprisingly, Excel doesn't provide a direct way to remove all hyperlinks on a worksheet. In fact, the only way to accomplish this is one cell at a time: Activate the cell that contains the hyperlink, right-click and then select Hyperlink-Remove Hyperlink. Unfortunately, this command is available only when you have selected a single cell. To quickly deactivate all hyperlinks, you need to use a macro: press <Alt>-<F11> to activate the Visual Basic Editor, select Insert-Module to insert a new VBA module into your project and then enter the following code:

When you execute the ZapHyperlinks macro, all hyperlinks on the active sheet are deleted and replaced with normal text.

Caption: Use this macro to convert Excel hyperlinks to plain text