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Add hyperlinks to your threaded comments in Excel

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Hi Office Insiders! My name is Scott McFadden, and I’m a Program Manager on the Excel team. I’m excited to share some recent updates to the threaded comments experience in Excel for Windows, Mac, and the web. We now support the use of hyperlinks in your comments!

Hyperlinks in threaded comments

Threaded comments facilitate detailed conversations about your Excel worksheet content with your collaborators, and these discussions will often refer to information or resources found in other places.

Previously, when you shared a URL or other link in a comment in Excel, the link text was not clickable. With this update, Excel supports hyperlinks in threaded comments, allowing you to directly link to relevant files and websites.

How it works

Ready to give hyperlinks in threaded comments a try?

1. Within any threaded comment (or reply to a comment), add a hyperlink by typing the destination address or pasting the link directly into the comment text. The hyperlink should render (become active) while the comment is in draft mode and save when it’s posted.

GIF showing the addition of a hyperlink into a threaded comment in Excel.

2. To navigate to the hyperlink destination, press the Ctrl key and click the link text. If you are working in Excel for Windows or Excel for Mac, the link will open in your default web browser. If you’re working in Excel for the web, it will open in a new tab.

NOTE: When viewing a threaded comment that includes a hyperlink, hovering over the text of the link reveals the destination URL, so you can determine where the link will take you before clicking it.

Known issues

  • When typing hyperlink text into the body of a comment in Excel on the web, you’ll need to include a space after the last character in order for the text to convert into a working hyperlink.
  • Copying text from a cell that contains a URL (e.g., https://www.microsoft.com) into a comment will render the URL as a hyperlink in the comment. However, if a hyperlink in a cell appears formatted as display text (e.g., “Microsoft – Cloud, Computers, Apps & Gaming”), it will not render as a hyperlink when copied into a comment.

Scenarios to try

  • Create a new threaded comment in your Excel worksheet and type in a destination URL (e.g., www.microsoft.com or www.microsoft.com/excel).
  • Copy a URL and paste it into a comment field in Excel.
  • Copy a link from one comment and paste it into another comment.

Availability

We will be rolling out hyperlinks in threaded comments to all users of Excel for the web in the coming months. It’s also available to Office Insiders running:

  • Windows Version 2110 (Build 14701.20210) or later
  • Mac Version 16.58 (Build 22010904) or later

Don’t have it yet? It’s probably us, not you.

Features are released over some time to ensure things are working smoothly. We highlight features that you may not have because they’re slowly releasing to larger numbers of Insiders. Sometimes we remove elements to further improve them based on your feedback. Though this is rare, we also reserve the option to pull a feature entirely out of the product, even if you, as an Insider, have had the opportunity to try it.

Feedback

We want to hear from you! Please click Help > Feedback to submit your feedback about this feature. Please tag your feedback with #hyperlinksincomments to make sure that we see it.

Learn what other information you should include in your feedback to ensure it’s actionable and reaches the right people. We’re excited to hear from you!

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