How to turn hundreds of text URLs in Excel into clickable hyperlinks?

The function in Excel for doing a hyperlink is =Hyperlink("http://www.techonthenet.com","Tech on the Net") where "http://www.techonthenet.com" is the internet address and "Tech on the Net" is the title that appears in the Excel cell.

Thus when you are writing the urls into the Excel file just wrap this function around each url. If you don't want to come up with a dynamic name you can always put the url as the name too.

If you aren't inserting the values programmatically then this site mentions using the HYPERLINK worksheet function. Though a even better reference is this which walks you through how to add a macro to excel and they supply the code for the macro. Thus when after you add this macro you can select the column of urls and run the macro and it converts the whole column into hyperlinks

From here: Convert URLs to Clickable Links In Excel

Public Sub Convert_To_Hyperlinks()
  Dim Cell As Range
  For Each Cell In Intersect(Selection, ActiveSheet.UsedRange)
    If Cell <> "" Then
      ActiveSheet.Hyperlinks.Add Cell, Cell.Value
    End If
  Next
End Sub

Creating the Macro

• Open your Excel doc
• Open the macro editor by pressing ALT+F11.
• In the Tools Menu, left-click View and select Project Explorer.
• Look for the folder called ‘Modules’, right-click it, select ‘Insert’, then select ‘Module’.
• Paste the code into the project module you have selected.
• Press ALT+F11 to return to your Excel workbook (or click on its icon in the Windows taskbar).

Run the Macro

• To execute the macro, select the unclickable text links you want to convert to clickable hyperlinks.
• Press ALT+F8 to open the Macro selector window and click on the macro you just created.
• Your Links are now all Clickable! Saving you time and data entry fatigue :)

Hard to believe there isn't an optional setting to tell Excel to treat URLs as live links. After all Outlook automatically does this. But then again - this is a Microsoft product, sigh.

I have a column of links in Excel. I selected the column and pasted it into an email to myself. When I got the mail (Excel column still selected) I pasted the live links back into the column. Done!

Alternatively, you could save the email as a draft and open the saved draft again. There's no need to actually send and receive the email.