Link to a row or cell in an excel sheet via URL

I am working with an excel sheet that is on a server that everyone on my team has access to.

When writing documentation I can reference a specific page or named location within the URL using a # symbol or ampersand.

Is there a way to do something similar in an excel sheet?

I would like to place this URL on an internal wiki/webpage. So I am hoping for something that can ultimately work out of an html anchor tag, that when clicked will launch excel with the workbook opened to the linked workbook with the linked cell highlighted.

E.g, is there a way to do something like this.

<a href="./some_document.pdf#page=106">Refer to page 106</a>

<a href="./some_workbook.xlsx?sheet_foo!A$7">Refer to entry bar in sheet foo</a>

Edit: I found a related post on SO which is similar to my question.. But this solution only seems to work for sharepoint when excel opens within the IE browser plugin. For my purposes it is fine to assume that the user is using IE, but this link will not be from a sharepoint site.

Nick

Posted 2015-11-09T14:48:29.703

Reputation: 141

Do excel open properly, even without the automatic highlight, when the user clicks your page's link? – Eduardo Poço – 2016-07-15T19:53:57.360

At best you can open the file and thats optimistic.Can't see a way to open a specific point within it. Good news is that if you want to just use this personally you can supply yourself with a plugin that interprets such custom links. I've commissioned people to do these kinds of custom jobs before. Last time around I paid 20$ and the coder wrote a plug-in for me in 5 minutes. All they have to do is detect the extension and fake they clicked to open a downloaded file with the specified location. – helena4 – 2016-07-19T08:01:42.257

Answers

This should work:

<a href="./some_workbook.xlsx#sheet_foo!A7">Refer to entry bar in sheet foo</a>

In your post, you used a question mark (?) instead of a hash sign (#). No need of dollar signs ($) for the range.

References:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/197922

according to the page, this works "as long as the HTML page is accessed via http ( not by double-clicking it in Windows Explorer, nor using file://) and Excel is opened within the browser. If Excel is opened outside of the browser, it will not move to the specified link."

http://agsci.psu.edu/it/how-to/linking-to-particular-excel-worksheet-from-web-page

Eduardo Poço

Posted 2015-11-09T14:48:29.703

Reputation: 161

Do you have any idea if there is a variation of this that would work for named ranges? I'm looking to link to a row in a document that's posted to OneDrive. If someone inserts a row above it, a hard reference to the row number is going to start pointing to the wrong row. – Matthew Flynn – 2016-07-18T16:14:26.823

it also works with named ranges, as excel treats ranges and named ranges interchangeably once it gets the string. Confirmed by http://agsci.psu.edu/it/how-to/linking-to-particular-excel-worksheet-from-web-page

– Eduardo Poço – 2016-07-18T19:00:18.940

Depending on which application you're using to write documentation (ex. Word, Excel), you can reference a cell like: <path>\my_excel_workbook#'sheet_foo'!A$7.

You need to add a hyperlink to your document.

SΛLVΘ

Posted 2015-11-09T14:48:29.703

Reputation: 1 157

1I don't need a hyperlink within excel or within office though, I need to be able to link from a webpage / wiki. I edited my question for clarity. – Nick – 2015-11-09T16:46:26.863