Found a new annoyance in Excel. I am analysing some data in Excel that’s been extracted from CiviCRM. Most of the data was submitted via webform. I easily managed to pull the URL out of the data to view the original webform submission. However, clicking the link in Excel I get an error:

A quick Google brings me to this site. Of course, you need to be an authenticated user to view the web form but Excel is unable to authenticate so it just fails. Well, in reality it just sees a 404 and tells you the link is broken. Once Excel makes this decision it won’t pass the URL to the browser to open. Great.

So, another quick Google about stopping Excel validating links brings me to Stack Exchange. Of course, I can’t comment on SE due to their chicken/egg “reputation” rules so the only option I have for drawing these two threads together is this blog post.  Hope it helps!