Open all links in Excel at once

Available in the free version of !SEMTools for Excel.

Excel is handy for keeping lists of links: to documents, websites, forms, reports. But if you need to open many links from a selected range at once, you have to click them one by one. It’s slow and inconvenient, and it’s easy to miss something.

How to open all links in Excel at once

Unfortunately, Excel has no built-in way to do this. There are two solutions: VBA or a free procedure in the !SEMTools add-in.

With a macro

Here is a macro that goes through the selected cells and opens every link it finds. It opens both real hyperlinks and URLs stored as plain text:

Sub OpenSelectedLinks()
    Dim cell As Range, addr As String
    For Each cell In Selection.Cells
        addr = ""
        If cell.Hyperlinks.Count > 0 Then
            addr = cell.Hyperlinks(1).Address
        ElseIf cell.Text Like "http*" Then
            addr = cell.Text
        End If
        If addr <> "" Then
            On Error Resume Next
            ThisWorkbook.FollowHyperlink addr
            On Error GoTo 0
        End If
    Next cell
End Sub

How to use it:

• Open the Developer tab → Visual Basic (or press Alt+F11).
• Insert a module (Insert → Module) and paste the code above.
• Select the cells with links.
• Press Alt+F8 and run OpenSelectedLinks.

The macro opens all valid links in your browser or the default app. Two things to keep in mind:

• Links created with the HYPERLINK function are not in the Hyperlinks collection. The macro opens them only if the cell text itself is a URL.
• Each link opens in a new browser tab. Don’t select thousands of cells at once: start with a few dozen.

To use the macro in any workbook, save it in the Personal Macro Workbook.

With !SEMTools

If you have the !SEMTools add-in installed, it’s even simpler:

• Open the !SEMTools tab.
• In the SEO + PPC group, choose Extract → From URL → Open all in browser.
• Select the range with links.
• Click OK.

The procedure opens all links in your default browser:

The value of the cell (the text you see) is what counts as the link here, not its hyperlink. In other words, the URLs in the cells don’t even have to be hyperlinks: they can be stored as plain text, and the procedure opens them all.

So if the text of your hyperlinks doesn’t match their addresses, first use the procedure to extract URLs from hyperlinks. Excel can’t do this with built-in functions either, but !SEMTools can. To open search results for the cell contents instead of the URLs, see how to search cells in Google from Excel. And to turn a list of text URLs into clickable links, see how to create and edit hyperlinks in bulk.

Summary

I hope you found what you were looking for on this page. The macro opens real hyperlinks and text URLs from the selection, and the free !SEMTools procedure does the same in a couple of clicks, without any code.