Excel hyperlink file paths changed after IT 'upgrade'

[rusty sparrow]

Gone round in circles trying to recover this, rather than manually correct a few hundred hyperlinks in an excel workbook.

I saved an excel workbook last night and then, on logging into a company laptop this morning, I had a mandatory software upgrade. After that, most of my hyperlinks had a new path added e.g. changed from Workbook%20One.xlsm#'Index 2'!A1 to ..\..\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Excel\Workbook%20One.xlsm#'I ndex 2'!A1

Which means that they don't work. I've tried a couple of macros I found and Kutools for Excel. Didn't work. Our IT support were useless.

Any fixes and how can I prevent this happening again?

[42go]

Out of interest - do you use Avast and do your outlook hyperlinks in emails work?

[rusty sparrow]

Out of interest - do you use Avast and do your outlook hyperlinks in emails work?

Never used Avast and don't have trouble with email hyperlinks - only this case which must have affected others of the several thousand work for this company whose IT support is in India. Got up very early and manually amended the links and saved backup copies!

[Jhieminga]

I can't help you with preventing this from happening again, but as for how to fix it, I would write a small macro that does a 'find and replace' on the hyperlinks. If all the hyperlinks start with the same 'WorkbookABCD" string, then you can run a search for that bit of text within the complete string and remove everything before it.

[PDR1]

It's a known issue which relates to how auto-recover operates with a mapped network drive. You will find it discussed in detail in This Thread (https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/ie/en-US/9f09d661-d355-4dcd-95e2-9df7c1495396/excel-2010-changes-links-from-network-location-to-local-user-appdata-on-opening-a-2003-file?forum=excel) together with some solutions/work-arounds. The best workaround would seem to be the one mentioned in the last few posts.

PDR

[India Four Two]

Based on several bitter experiences in the past, I never link Excel workbooks by hyperlinks. The drawbacks outweigh the perceived benefits.

[Asturias56]

Linking ANY Spreadsheet is dangerous even when you retain complete control of them - in a shared environment they can be literally lethal.

Someone decides to make a small, simple, change and (say) copies something and then pastes it AS VALUES rather than as a formula..... and it may be years before it shows up.....

I was always taught to occasionally change an input (say product price ) to something really crazy - and see what came out..... sometimes nothing changes very much - which is worrying.

And of course there was the business of opening T5 at LHR when none of the staff could get into the Car Park as their ID's didn't match their cars in the data base. In the run-up to opening they kept amending the list in EXCEL, adding people and removing them ... and then they re-sorted into Alphabetical order - but only the NAMES column - not the ID Column............ several times.........

[rusty sparrow]

Thanks for all the helpful comments. The hyperlinks are mainly to pages in the workbook so relative addresses are what I would like to use, but I can't find that as an option.

I'll just make sure to close any excel workbooks and have backups on the cloud. I only have to use this worksheet until June when I thankfully retire!