Excel hyperlinks to Sharepoint documents not working

Question

I'm using an Excel file stored on a Sharepoint server using Excel Web Access.
The file contains several hyperlinks to other documents hosted on the same Sharepoint, that always worked fine.
Some days ago, the hyperlinks began not work any more, because all blank spaces contained in the file name become %2520 instead of %20.
The funny thing is that if the same Excel document is opened from a synchronized directory using the Excel App, the hyperlinks worrk fine.
Any news about recent modifications on the behaviour of Excel Web Access , and suggestions to fix this error?

Answer 1

Hi @D'Orazio Mario ,

As per my test, I can also reproduce this issue on my end. I find a workaround: if you use Hyperlink function, and replace "%20" with space back for URL ("%20" which is a space in the path), you could open the hyperlink normally.

=HYPERLINK("url","display text")  

Back to this issue, I'm afraid the cause is that there is something wrong in the backend which we have no control of. You can create a service request in Microsoft 365 admin center to check this issue with Microsoft experts.

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Answer 2

We were having similar issues. Had an Excel spreadsheet with links to Word docs all housed on SharePoint. Links would work fine in some instances and not others, and eventually all be broken. We determined every employee needed to update their Excel to stop "auto updating of links upon saving", see below for steps we took to fix this problem:

Open Excel
Click File

Click Options

Click Advanced on left menu
Scroll down to General heading (on right)
Click on Web Options button

Click on Files tab
UNCHECK box ‘Update links on save’
Click OK
Click OK

Answer 3

The problem disappeared by itself few weeks later; I supposed that it was caused by some service pack applied on your servers that fixed the problem, probably caused by an unstable version that was released by mistake