Create PDF with internal hyperlinks

I've worked out that saving as PDF from Word will do this...i.e. internal hyperlinks are migrated to the PDF. However Excel and Powerpoint don't seem to do it.

According to the answer I'll upvote, Excel will export external hyperlinks, not internal.

PDF hyperlinks need to be defined/created with the PDF authoring tool. Excel doesn't know anything about PDFs, so its hyperlinks don't necessarily mean anything in PDF format unless your authoring tool can both read the Excel links and translate them into the PDF it authors. It sounds like pdfFactory doesn't do this on its own. Perhaps pdfFactory Pro would grant you the feature set necessary to achieve this.

Adobe Acrobat is the application that works with the PDF format most natively, and can definitely do this, but it is pricey. There may be alternative 3rd party software that can also do links; you may be able to take your PDF without links and use some software like that to add them later.

This list of PDF software may be helpful.

I explored all these options then remembered the LibreOffice (the former OpenOffice) was very good at this sort of thing. If you put your Excel .xlsx, existing internal links to named ranges and all, into LibreOffice Calc you can then use the LibreOffice 'File/Export as PDF' and you get a perfect internally linked PDF. Of course, not all the formatting and formulae options of .xlsx are supported compatibly in LibreOffice.