Getting Rid of Hyperlinks in Footnotes

Dennis has a small macro that does a great job of removing hyperlinks from within a document. He just received a new document to work with, and it has quite a few hyperlinks in footnotes. The macro doesn't remove these hyperlinks, and removing them manually is a huge chore. Dennis wonders if there is a way to remove hyperlinks in footnotes all at once.

Actually, there is a way. You can manually do it, if you desire, by following these steps:

1. Position the insertion pointer within the body of a footnote. (It doesn't matter which footnote.)
2. Press Ctrl+A. This selects all of the footnotes. (If all of the text in your document is selected, it means you didn't perform step 1.)
3. Press Ctrl+Shift+F9. This converts the hyperlinks in the selected text (the footnotes) to regular text.

You should note that these steps actually convert all fields in the selected text into regular text. Since hyperlinks are implemented through the use of fields, they are converted. But, so are any other fields that may be in your footnotes. If you don't want to change other fields, or if you have a need to deal with hyperlinks in footnotes quite a bit, you may want to, instead, use a macro.

The following macro will get rid of hyperlinks in only the footnotes:

Sub RemoveFNH()
    Dim h As Hyperlink

    With ActiveDocument
        If .Footnotes.Count >= 1 Then
            With .StoryRanges(wdFootnotesStory)
                For Each h In .Hyperlinks
                    h.Delete
                Next h
            End With
        End If
    End With
End Sub

Note that the important part of the macro is the specification of working with the wdFootnotesStory story range. Word documents can consist of multiple story ranges, each representing a different element, such as headers, footers, footnotes, etc. If you want to remove hyperlinks from all parts of your document (which means from all of the story ranges), then you can use an even shorter macro:

Sub RemoveAllHyperlinks()
    Dim r As Range
    Dim h As Hyperlink

    For Each r In ActiveDocument.StoryRanges
        For Each h In rng.Hyperlinks
            h.Delete
        Next h
    Next r
End Sub

The macro steps through each of the story ranges in the document and, if there are hyperlinks in that story range, deletes each of them.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (4636) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, Word in Microsoft 365, and 2021.