Content of the link available on computer

[HaworthEstates]

Hello everybody.

Long story short: I have two worksheets. On the first one, a have a table with two columns: "Layout Code" and "Layout Plan". The "Layout Plan" column contains a link to an internal document (PDF, PNG, etc.).
On the second worksheet, I have a dashboard where I choose from a popup list the "Layout Code".
Using a Vlookup formula, how can I display the content of the link (the image in the file) and not the link itself?

Many thanks and apologize if the question was answered before, but I could not find it.

Yours,

 

[severynm]

To my knowledge, you cannot, at least within Excel itself. I have seen come complicated methods for getting images to show as a kind of "popup" using a custom userform or comments, but I cannot comment how effective they are; they would also be useless for opening any other file type.

You could have some code to automatically open whatever file is chosen from the dropdown with the default viewer (e.g. Photos or Adobe Reader, etc.). However, especially if you want to display the actual content of the file (not just an embedded link), and change between those previews with ease, in my opinion Excel is not the best tool for the job and you may be better suited with some sort of simple HTML interface.

Excel is great for many things, but in my experience, this is not one of them.

 

[HaworthEstates]

To my knowledge, you cannot, at least within Excel itself. I have seen come complicated methods for getting images to show as a kind of "popup" using a custom userform or comments, but I cannot comment how effective they are; they would also be useless for opening any other file type.

You could have some code to automatically open whatever file is chosen from the dropdown with the default viewer (e.g. Photos or Adobe Reader, etc.). However, especially if you want to display the actual content of the file (not just an embedded link), and change between those previews with ease, in my opinion Excel is not the best tool for the job and you may be better suited with some sort of simple HTML interface.

Excel is great for many things, but in my experience, this is not one of them.

Thank you so much for the feedback. Upon some more research, I found that is a bit impossible, due to security reasons.