Preserve HTML links

[vandehey]

HI gang, I have a question. I used an online DB that retuned about 1200 results, in an HTML table. I am trying to ultimately get this information into a FM database. To do this, I copied all the info, and pasted it into Excel. Everything looks great. The first colum (or field) is a hypertext link to more information specific to the result. When I paste the info into Excel, it retains this hypertext link. When I click on the link in Excel, it launches my browser and displays the info.

To get it from Excel to FM Pro, I save it as a tab-delimited text file. I then inport it to FM. When I do this, I lose the hypertext link. The data contained in the field are instead displayed in quotes.

Is there any way to preserve these links in FM Pro? Thanks for the help!

[-Queue-]

Attach a button to your field containing the hyperlink to Open URL [No dialog, fieldname].

[vandehey]

Thanks for the repy. I have a thousand plus records, so I can't manually add the URLs back into the DB. Is there a way to harvest the URLs from original Excel file so they are inported to a field in FM Pro?

[-Queue-]

If each URL is in its own field per record, the above should work, except you may need to Substitute( fieldname, """", "" ) to remove the quotes. If you are saying that, for example, the original hyperlink was

<a href=http://www.yahoo.com>Yahoo</a>

and you imported "Yahoo", then you would need to retrieve the actual URL. I'm not sure if there is an Excel function that will provide just the URL portion of a hyperlink.

[vandehey]

The problem is that no URL information is making it to FM. Here is a simple expaination. If you create a blank Excel document, and enter the word 'link' into a cell. Create a hyperlink on that word to www.fmforums.com. Clicking on the word 'link' in Excel takes you to fmforums in your browser.

When I export the Excel file as a tab delimited text file (so I can import it into FM), the only thing in the text file is the word 'link'. In other words, it discarded the hyperlink to www.fmforums.com. Maybe this is a question better asked in an Excel forum, but is there anyway I can get the hyperlink information into the delimited text file? Sure I could just go to FM after it's imported and add a hyperlink to www.fmforums.com, but I have 1000+ records, all linking to different URLs.

Is there any other way to import Excel data into FM Pro that might be more inclusive to the hyperlink data? Is there possibly a way to get HTML table information from a webpage into FM without using Excel?

Thanks again for the help, I appreciate it!

[kiwiora]

Make sure you have a backup of the excel spreadsheet. (Probably best to copy the hyperlink column into a new blank spreadsheet as this macro will start from A1 and insert the actual link in column :

Create the following macro

Sub GetHyperlinkAddress()

Dim HyperlinkAddress As String

On Error Resume Next

Range("A1").Activate

While Not IsEmpty(ActiveCell)

HyperlinkAddress = ActiveCell.Hyperlinks(1).Address

ActiveCell(, 2) = HyperlinkAddress

ActiveCell.Offset(1, 0).Select

Wend

End Sub

This will duplicate the actual link (i.e www.xyz.com) into the column to the right and you can export.