Copy links from a web document and paste ONLY the URL's into Excel?

[Marshall Reeves]

Hello:

Is there anyone out there who knows of a simple way to copy a link (or a
column of links) from a web document, and then paste only the URL of the
link/links into Excel? Or alternatively, paste the whole link into Excel
(url plus label), and then somehow "strip" the labels off so that only the
URL is displaying? Excel will let you paste links, and it recognizes them as
such, meaning the URL text gets in there, but I just can't get it to display
in a separate column from the label. I need this because I generate pages
from a PERL script that inputs data in a delimited text file (dumped from
the Excel spreadsheet). One of the fields is the journal title, and another
is the URL.

For instance, suppose you were at a web page listing the titles that a
publisher includes in a database. The publisher is nice enough to list all
the journals by title, and make each entry a link. This is fine for
copying/pasting a title list in Excel, but it offers no way of getting the
URL's for each title into the spreadsheet, without a lot of manipulation.
I'm sure it can be done with VB or PERL or something, but one would think
there would be a simple way in Excel to "PASTE/URL" or reformat a column to
display the URL rather than the link label...this would be a natural under
the "PASTE SPECIAL" menu option, but it's not there. Anyone got any ideas?

thanks,
Mars


Marshall L. Reeves, Computer Applications Coordinator
University of South Florida Virtual Library Project
PH: (813)974-8599 FX: (813)974-5153
Virtual Library homepage: http://www.lib.usf.edu/virtual/
My homepage: http://www.lib.usf.edu/~mreeves/

"We are alone, with no excuses." -- Sartre
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