mailto: hyperlinks in Excel spreadsheet have flipped out!!

I have a user who maintains a list of contacts in an excel spreadsheet
(incl. name, address, email addy, etc). Last week, the worksheet was
fine, but as of Friday, it appears to have been corrupted or something
(I'm not quite sure what happened, that's why I'm posting this!)
Normally, the only cells that have a mailto: hyperlink are the email
addresses (when the user clicks on the email address, the hyperlink
automatically opens a new email message to the recipient's email
address). Normal behavior, right?

Well now, the spreadsheet has populated itself with thousands of
mailto: hyperlinks in random cells, even cells in columns OTHER than
the email addy column. Even blank cells have a hyperlink embedded in
them, and 95% of the cells that do contain information have a
hyperlink to some email address. There are probably 5 or 6 email
address that have become embedded as hyperlinks throughout the
spreadsheet (in the name column, address column, phone# column, etc).
It's mind-boggling to try and figure out any rhyme or reason to the
madness. All of the 'incorrect' hyperlinks are actual email addresses
contained in the spreadsheet in the "email address" column - but
somehow they have been copied to a bunch of other cells as well.

Has anybody experienced this phenomenon before? I copied a snippet of
VB code to display what the hyperlinks are pointing to, and they're
the same 5 or 6 addresses over and over again. What on earth could
"copy and paste" a hyperlink from one cell to another (and NOT replace
the visible content of the cell as well, JUST the hyperlink value?!?)

I seriously doubt the user did this herself, as she would've had to go
into each cell and manually edit the hyperlink (and there are
thousands of them).

Any suggestions or thoughts would be appreciated!! Tx.

If you assign a hyperlink (rightclick menu) you assign it to
the selection not just the active cell. Same thing if you
use a macro and have multiple cells in your range.

If you want to remove all hyperlinks to get a fresh start
or populate some cells with the hyperlink address as displayed in
text see my page.
http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/excel...#DelHyperlinks
The MakeHyperlinks macro will assign hyperlinks individually for each
cell in the selection not as one range.
http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/excel...MakeHyperlinks
---
HTH,
David McRitchie, Microsoft MVP - Excel [site changed Nov. 2001]
My Excel Pages: http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/excel/excel.htm
Search Page: http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/excel/search.htm

"causemaker" wrote in message om...
I have a user who maintains a list of contacts in an excel spreadsheet
(incl. name, address, email addy, etc). Last week, the worksheet was
fine, but as of Friday, it appears to have been corrupted or something
(I'm not quite sure what happened, that's why I'm posting this!)
Normally, the only cells that have a mailto: hyperlink are the email
addresses (when the user clicks on the email address, the hyperlink
automatically opens a new email message to the recipient's email
address). Normal behavior, right?

Well now, the spreadsheet has populated itself with thousands of
mailto: hyperlinks in random cells, even cells in columns OTHER than
the email addy column. Even blank cells have a hyperlink embedded in
them, and 95% of the cells that do contain information have a
hyperlink to some email address. There are probably 5 or 6 email
address that have become embedded as hyperlinks throughout the
spreadsheet (in the name column, address column, phone# column, etc).
It's mind-boggling to try and figure out any rhyme or reason to the
madness. All of the 'incorrect' hyperlinks are actual email addresses
contained in the spreadsheet in the "email address" column - but
somehow they have been copied to a bunch of other cells as well.

Has anybody experienced this phenomenon before? I copied a snippet of
VB code to display what the hyperlinks are pointing to, and they're
the same 5 or 6 addresses over and over again. What on earth could
"copy and paste" a hyperlink from one cell to another (and NOT replace
the visible content of the cell as well, JUST the hyperlink value?!?)

I seriously doubt the user did this herself, as she would've had to go
into each cell and manually edit the hyperlink (and there are
thousands of them).

Any suggestions or thoughts would be appreciated!! Tx.