WordService and Pages

Miscellaneous Needful things
1

For a long time, I used Excel to download and manipulate information for my business. Some of this data has hyperlinks in it, and Excel has an easy “remove hyperlinks” command to strip them out.

I got a new laptop, and have not yet purchased a new license for MS:Office, thinking I could make do with the suite of Mac products. I find Pages very counter intuitive after years of Excel, and today I found there’s no Remove Hyperlinks function. Searching, I found WordService, which should be the answer, but is seems I need to highlight the individual contents of each cell in order for the Remove Hyperlink option to pop up.

Is there no way to remove the links from a series of cells? Will I need to highlight the contents of each cell in order to use this service? I’m a Mac fangurl through and through, but MS:Office is looking more and more desirable.

2

Services like this work on a selection, so yes, you’d need to select the contents of the cell.

And yes… as much as I’m not a Microsoft fan, Excel makes Numbers look like a child’s toy. :open_mouth: 8)

3

Excel is a spreadsheet and Pages is a word processor.

As for Numbers, given my use of spreadsheets, I find it better than excel.

4

Yeah I meant Numbers…I hate all those programs…

Yeah when I’ve got over 100 cells each week that need to be stripped of their hyperlinks, I don’t have time to select the contents of each cell. Thanks anyway - guess I gotta cough up the money for MS:Office.

5

If the cells contain data and not formulas, another easy option is:

  1. Select the range of cells, copy them, and paste them into a new window of a plain-text editor such as TextEdit in plain-text mode (if you’re not already using TextEdit in plain-text mode, select the menu item Format > Make Plain Text to convert to plain text) or TextWrangler/BBEdit or any of the many other plain-text editors.
  2. Select all of the text that you just pasted, copy it, and paste it back into the spreadsheet. You may need to use the command Edit > Paste Special… (or whatever its equivalent is in Numbers) to indicate how the pasted text should be interpreted.

If you have not tried LibreOffice and NeoOffice, I would recommend trying them before buying Microsoft Office; they are also very good. LibreOffice is completely free (although it appears to be a second-class citizen on the Mac, since when I downloaded it and installed it, all LibreOffice documents had generic icons, not application-specific icons). A trial/demo version of NeoOffice can be downloaded from the NeoOffice website.