Hyperlinks can provide readers with references, sources, or additional information. However, sometimes you may want to remove hyperlinks from your document, whether for aesthetic, security, or convenience reasons.
Microsoft Word is a prevalent and widely used word-processing application in various fields, such as education, business, and media. This app has many features that can help you create professional, creative, and informative documents. One frequently used feature is hyperlinks, which are text or objects that can be clicked to open a web page, file, or other location associated with your document.
Hyperlinks can help you provide additional information to your readers, such as references, sources, or illustrations. However, sometimes you may want to remove hyperlinks from your document, for some reasons, such as:
- You want to make your document neater and cleaner, without any colored or underlined text or objects that are different from normal text.
- You want to avoid any security or privacy risks hyperlinks may pose, such as viruses, malware, or phishing.
- You want to save storage space or bandwidth of your document because hyperlinks can increase the file size or loading time of your document.
Whatever your reason, removing hyperlinks from a Word document is not difficult. There are several ways you can do to remove hyperlinks from Word documents easily and quickly.
In this article, we will explain some of those ways in detail and step by step. We will also provide some tips and tricks to better manage hyperlinks in Word.
Remove hyperlinks one by one
The first way to remove hyperlinks from a Word document is to remove them one by one. This method is suitable for those of you who only have a few hyperlinks in your document, or only want to remove certain hyperlinks. Here are the steps:
- Open the Word document that contains the hyperlink that you want to remove.
- Right-click on the hyperlink you want to remove.
- Choose Remove Hyperlink from the menu that appears.
In this way, you can remove hyperlinks from Word documents individually. However, if you have many hyperlinks in your document, this method may take a lot of time and effort. For that, you can use other ways that we will explain below.
Remove all hyperlinks at once
The second way to remove hyperlinks from a Word document is to remove them all at once. This method is suitable for those of you who have many hyperlinks in your document or want to clean all hyperlinks from your document without exception. Here are the steps:
- Open the Word document that contains the hyperlink that you want to remove.
- Press “Ctrl+A” to select all text and objects in your document.
- Press “Ctrl+Shift+F9” to remove all hyperlinks from your selection.
In this way, you can remove all hyperlinks from Word documents in an instant. However, note that this will also remove all other fields that may be in your document, such as page numbers, dates, or the table of contents.
If you don’t want to delete the field, you can use another method that we will explain below.
Remove All Hyperlinks with Context Menu
The third way to remove hyperlinks from a Word document is to use the context menu. A context menu is a menu that appears when you right-click on a specific text or object. The context menu usually displays options relevant to the content you clicked on. Here are the steps:
- Open the Word document that contains the hyperlink that you want to remove.
- Press “Ctrl+A” to select all text and objects in your document.
- Right-click on your selection and select Remove Hyperlink from the context menu.
In this way, you can remove all hyperlinks from a Word document without removing other fields that may exist in your document. However, it should be noted that this method only works if your document was created with a version of Word 2010 or later.
If your document was created with an earlier version of Word, you may not find the Remove Hyperlinks option in the context menu.
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Remove All Hyperlinks with VBA
The fourth way to remove hyperlinks from a Word document is to use VBA (Visual Basic for Applications). VBA is a programming language that you can use to create macros or scripts that can perform certain tasks automatically in Office applications such as Word. Here are the steps:
- Open the Word document that contains the hyperlink that you want to remove.
- Press “Alt+F11” to open the Visual Basic Editor window.
- In the “Visual Basic Editor” window, click “Insert > Module” to create a new module.
- In the new module window, copy and paste the following code:
Sub RemoveAllHyperlinks()
Dim h As Hyperlink
For Each h In ActiveDocument.Hyperlinks
h.Delete
Next h
End Sub- Press F5 to run the code.
In this way, you can remove all hyperlinks from Word documents by using VBA. The advantage of using this method is that you can customize the code according to your needs.
For example, you can add a condition or filter to remove only specific hyperlinks, or you can add a message or voice to notify you when the removal process is complete.