Excel 2000: Getting hyperlinks to stay put 1

[OsakaWebbie]

Background: I have Excel 2000, and the spreadsheet in question has never been opened in any other version, nor do I expect it to ever be. (Stating that up front may avoid rabbit trail discussions, because searching for the answer to this question turned up many pages about a bug related to opening the same file in different versions.) This spreadsheet has hundreds of hyperlinks to MP3 files in another directory tree.

Recently I got a network drive, and moved a whole bunch of stuff from my local drive (S to the new one (which I designated G, including the directory tree that includes the audio files. But I want to keep the spreadsheet on my local drive. When I realized that I had unthinkingly broken the hyperlinks, I assumed that the paths were absolute, so I thought the solution was simply to juggle the drive letters so that the new drive is S:. But when I did that (changing my local data drive to N, all the hyperlinks changed to paths starting with "N"! So although the paths are spelled out when I look at them, they must really be relative, not absolute.

So my question is: If I move the spreadsheet temporarily onto the same drive to get everything to line up, is there any way to change all these links (in one step or series of steps, of course - not one by one!) to be absolute, so that I can then move the file back without losing the links? Or do you have some other idea other than resigning myself to having the spreadsheet and audio files on the same drive? (There are organizational reasons why I would prefer another solution if I can figure it out.)

 

[GlennUK]

If I move the spreadsheet temporarily onto the same drive to get everything to line up, is there any way to change all these links (in one step or series of steps, of course - not one by one!) to be absolute, so that I can then move the file back without losing the links?

Once you've moved the spreadsheet temporarily, have you tried simply opening it, and then doing File/Save As to the other drive?

Cheers, Glenn.

Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.

 

[OsakaWebbie]

What a simple thing - why didn't I think of that?

But a word of wisdom for those who might read this later - when I moved the file to the drive where the audio files are, at first I was lazy and tried just putting it in the root directory without creating the structure it was in before, but that really makes a mess of things - the link path would no longer appear when I hovered, and when I right-clicked and selected Edit Hyperlink to see what was going on, the links looked like "..\..\the old path", which of course doesn't work since the file was in root already. So I had to recreate the path structure.

But after the Save As back to the place I want it to be, it decided that absolute is a better way of doing the links. In fact, it's even more absolute than I expected - it didn't use the drive letter at all, or even the Shared Folder designation for the partition that has the new data - the new path now starts with the network name of the whole drive and works it way from there ("\\NetName\Partition\rest\of\path"). And now it doesn't break no matter where I put the Excel file - sweet!