Hyperlinks in Excel

More and more Excel is used instead of Power Point to develop nice presentations. Using Excel for presentations adds credibility to your show it looks less like bells and whistles.

In this era of resource conservation you also need you to make your reports user friendly on screen.

Finally, a report that is well designed and easy to walk through will deserve more attention.

For these reasons hyperlinks become an interesting feature. Like when you are surfing the WWW, you click on a word, an image, a text box or anything else and you are taken somewhere else. This technology is called hyperlinks and it exists within Excel.

With these hyperlinks you can surf  from one sheet of the workbook to the other, from one workbook to another (opened or not) and you can open any other file created with any other program (Word, Internet Explorer, etc.).

You can create hyperlinks in Excel and attach them to images, text boxes and any other objects. We strongly suggest that you never create hyperlinks attached to words and cells. They are a mess to manage.

Add text boxes, images or autoShapes in your sheets and attach hyperlinks to them.

In any version of Excel (1197 to 2007): To create an hyperlink you right click on the object that you have just added to the sheet, you select "Hyperlink" and you follow the instructions.

Using the hyperlinks you can insert a map of New-England on a worksheet and when you click on a State you are taken to the table and chart concerning that State. Your on screen presentation will impress. See "excel-example-imagemap.xls".

Yo can also use hyperlinks to access you other spreadsheets instead of going down a long list of directories and sub-directories in "My Computer" or "Widows Explorer" Download "0-switchboard-excel.xls" that gives you access to 24 other spreadsheets (tutorials, examples and case studies)

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There are  five sections in this website

Section 1: About Databases: 4 lessons
In this section we review the basic notions on databases and evaluate Excel as a database. You will then see how Excel can be used downstream from most centralized databases and data management programs. Finally we will discuss the "upgrade" from Excel to Access..
Section 2: Excel and External Data: 7 Lessons
There are many ways to get data into your Excel Workbooks and there are many ways to easily extract data from all the databases in your organization and the Internet. This section is centered on querying data
Section 3: Analyzing Data with Excel: 8 lessons
Once you have the data in the right formats within your Excel workbook it is time to use the powerful analytical tools of Excel including the database functionalities (sort, filter, subtotals), the integrated calculator, the comparative analysis tools and the mysterious and not so complicated pivot tables. 
Section 4: Reporting with Excel: 7 lessons
The report is a communication tool and you can not accept to compromise on its presentation. Excel is the best reporting tool allowing you to easily develop popular dashboards and to share these reports with multiple colleagues.
Section 5: Other Functionalities in Excel: 3 lessons
In this fifth section you will review the useful CTRL and ALT keystrokes, the conditional formatting, the drop-down lists and other interesting functionalities.