Excel – Make Excel open some hyperlinks with non-default browser

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A bunch of our network/server/storage hardware uses web interfaces for their administrative portals. I'm currently using an Excel 2010 worksheet to keep track of each device. I have one column set aside to list the URL for each web interface. This makes it easy to simply click the URL to open each administrative portal.

My default browser is Firefox. However, some of the administrative portals don't play well with Firefox and require the use of IE. Until now, when I want to open a hyperlink in IE, I have to manually open IE, copy the URL from the Excel worksheet, and paste it into the IE address bar (otherwise it will open in Firefox if I simply click it). It's just an annoying extra couple of steps.

So without changing Firefox as my default browser, is there a simple way in Excel 2010 to tell it which hyperlinks to open in IE when they are clicked? I want to choose specifically which links open in which browser

(For reference I'm using Windows 7 Enterprise 64-bit)

Best Answer

Short answer, no. Excel has no option to open an url with another program than specified by the system as default.

Excel will threat an url by simply doing: Start url (aka using DDE extension to open the url with whatever is set as default program).

Using a VB Macro, you can however create a custom link that'll launch the link with IE.

It will require a bit of programming and is not easy, and you may have to edit all cells and remove the hyperlink and save the link as text alone in that box for it to work properly.

Although SuperUser is not a scripting site (and a new question specifically for programming should be asked at StackOverflow if you're going to do it that way), you'd be trying to do it as follows.

Launch a macro everytime any cell is clicked (function Sheet1_clicked()) I believe is the event. Then break out of the function if the column is not the column you have your urls in, or alternatively, if the cell does not start with #URL:. You can even check if the next column has this value, so you can effectively hide that column, and make the column before it the event clicking one. You can use a conditional forward to check if the next cell has any text, and if so using colors, show a "click me" text.

Now, in the script itself, you'd program to launch IExplore.exe with the url.

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