Excel Hyperlink Issue


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Barbobot

-the Pirate King
Retired
At work me and another coop have been given the job of creating more of a central database of all the drawings we have in our technical library used by the MBTA. Most of the drawings are currently on a shared network drive. We want to create an excel file that acts as a database to make it easy to find drawings by DWG # or Drawing Description. Then next to that put in a hyperlink to the image so that you can just click the link from the excel file and have the image file open up. The problem I'm facing is the excel file just will not open up any of the files on network drive. I can open word documents, pdfs, image files (jpeg and tif), and so on if they are on the local C drive, but not on the network drive. If I try opening up one of the tif files on the network drive through the hyperlink in excel it will start up the program (in this case PS CS2) but not the actual image. If I turn the default program for .tifs to the Windows Picture and Fax Viewer then nothing happens at all after clicking the link.

Any ideas?
 
I'd suggest using a real database rather than an excel file.

Even Microsoft Access is better than having a spreadsheet.

As for why it won't open the file when you click on the link I don't really know what could be the problem there. It could be that excel just doesn't support linking to files on networked storage or one of many other problems.
 
Bit of a late response but, apart from agreeing a database would be better, it could be Windows security zones have got screwed up.
I found after installing IE7 last year that shortcuts to files located on other machines on our network stopped working. It turned out that when you install IE7 it changes your security settings so all the machines on your intranet become untrusted and you have to add them back in manually to the trusted sites zone (even if you're not using IE to access things).
The problem only seems to affect links and shortcuts, e.g. I couldn't open a remote database by clicking on a desktop shortcut, but if I ran Access first and then used File Open from there and navigated across the network to the file it was ok.
 
Thanks for the responses.

Excel could link to files on the network cause I had made just a test Word file and put it in the same directory as the image files and that worked just fine. But oh well. I already have quite a bit of it done and have absolutely no clue how to use Access so I'll probably just keep things as is for now. I had called our IT and they had absolutely no clue why it was doing this. Although my boss doesn't seem to care a whole lot if the hyperlinks don't work as long as the network location is still there so that's all we ended up doing. (Although I did make myself proud by finding out how to output the entire contents of a directory into a text file, which made it extremely easy to input the names of all 1700+ image files that were in the folder into excel).
 
Barbobot, does it only have this problem with .tiff images, or does it affect jpg/png/gif/etc as well? If it's only .tiff images, converting all the images might be beneficial depending on what the actual goal of the image database is for (are you trying to access images for editing, or access them for viewing? How important is quality? File size? etc)
 
QUOTE (dchaosblade @ May 05 2009, 11:26 PM) Barbobot, does it only have this problem with .tiff images, or does it affect jpg/png/gif/etc as well? If it's only .tiff images, converting all the images might be beneficial depending on what the actual goal of the image database is for (are you trying to access images for editing, or access them for viewing? How important is quality? File size? etc)
I've tried it with jpegs on the server and had pretty much the same problem. But when I copied the .tiff image to my desktop and linked to it there it worked fine so I don't think it's the file type that's the issue. And would it even be reasonable to change the file type of 1700+ images (which by the way not even covers 1/5 of the total images we have on the server that we are working with for this job)?

The link would just be for viewing or maybe printing out 11x17 copies. Most of hte files seem to range from 500-1200 kb.
 
Can anybody help? i have hyperlinked some tiff files into an excel spreadsheet and am using irfamview as the program to open them, the hyperlinks are linked up to the files correctly and it is opening irfamview when i click on them but it appears the drawing doesn't come up and i am just left with the blue background, has anybody had a similar problem before and if so please can you tell me how to fix it?

Kind Regards
 
you could create a macro that opens the hyperlink with the press of a button...
for each reference in the database include this code next to where the hyperlink should be
CODE ActiveWorkbook.FollowHyperlink Address:="(Enter location in here, along with file name)", NewWindow:=True
this could also work if you only want to open the location of the file but not the file itself...
if you want a specific program to open the file use

CODE processID = Shell("<<program name>> M:\_Pix\" &  txtCurrTitle & ".jpg")[obviously changing everything between and including the <<>>]

if your boss finds it acceptable that the location is not automatically opened, you can still get some brownie points using this example to add a graphical aid in the seach of images.
 
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