Check if Hyperlink has been previously clicked ?

[Jaafar Tribak]

Hi all,

As you know, when an hyperlink is clicked in excel or in other applications, its text color changes visually indicating that the link has already been followed. The color is reset to its default when re-opening excel. (Depending on the update automatic links at open setting)

I am wondering if there is a programmatic way of checking if an hyperlink has already been visited since the workbook was last opened.

I thought about using the Workbook_SheetFollowHyperlink event and tag the followed hyperlink(s) (using the Target argument) but I thought maybe there was a simpler more straightforward way, specially if the worksheets contain many hyperlinks.

Any thoughts.

Thank you.

 

[vcoolio]

Hello Jaafar,

I was reading the following article about a week ago. I came across it by accident:-

https://excel.tips.net/T007198_Showing_Visited_Hyperlinks.html

It may help you in your quest.

Cheerio,
vcoolio.

 

[Jaafar Tribak]

Hello Jaafar,

I was reading the following article about a week ago. I came across it by accident:-

https://excel.tips.net/T007198_Showing_Visited_Hyperlinks.html

It may help you in your quest.

Cheerio,
vcoolio.

Thanks vcoolio for answering.

I had already visited that link and others before posting here but none address the question asked in this thread ...The article talks about how to make the visited status of an hyperlink survive the save operation.

 

[vcoolio]

Hi Jaafar,

After reading that article, I played around with colouring the relevant hyperlink cell and then using Offset(,1) to place the NOW() function in the adjacent cell to show when the hyperlink was last used.....no real luck with that idea. I suppose that your original idea may be the way to go. Simplicity doesn't really come into play with this issue!

Cheerio,
vcoolio.

 

[Jaafar Tribak]

Surely, there are roundabout ways to solve this but what I had in mind was like having a Boolean function that simply takes an hyperlink object in its argument and return TRUE if previously visited FALSE otherwise without the need to use the FollowHyperlink event and store each hyperlink state somewehere.

I have just found something that looks promising namely the IAccessible::get_accState method of the IAccessible interface that is fortunately exposed in excel via the office library and then just check if the STATE_SYSTEM_TRAVERSED flag is set for the hyperlink.

Not sure how easy this is or if it would work at all.