This is the second part in a series describing how to use the Hyperlink tool in Microsoft Excel. Check out the first part in the series here. In this part, we will be exploring how to insert an internal link into your spreadsheets.

For our purposes, we will define an internal link as a link back to the same spreadsheet or another spreadsheet in the same workbook. What could this be useful for? A good example of this would be if you are using a Help page in your spreadsheets. This way, you could have a separate spreadsheet as the Help page, then link the places where help is available in the other spreadsheets to specific parts of this page. So how do you go about doing this?

I’m going to skip how to open the dialog, as that was discussed in the first article (see link above). Assuming the dialog is open, select the Place in This Document option in the Link to: box. The result is shown below:

Here is the breakdown of the components of this dialog (labeled by number in the screenshot above):

1 - Text to display - This was described in the last article, however to recap: This is text that will display in the cell that the hyperlink is placed in. For example, if I was linking to “Sheet2!A1″ I might use “Customer One” as the text for this link.

2 - Type the cell reference - This is where you can type the cell location of your link target. For example, if you put “A1″ in there (as is shown in the screenshot) then the link would go to cell A1 on your current spreadsheet (Sheet1 in this case). However, if you wanted to link to cell A1 in Sheet2 instead, then you could put “Sheet2!A1″.

3 - Or select a place in this document - This is basically a shortcut for typing in your cell references. Using the above example of linking to cell A1 in Sheet 2, instead of typing in “Sheet2!A1″ in the Type the cell reference text box, you could select “Sheet2″ in this box under Cell Reference and just have “A1″ in the Type the cell reference text box. The effect would be the same. You can also link to a defined name. For example, say I named cells A1-A3 on Sheet3 as “Customers”. I then could link to “Customers” by clicking on it under Defined Names.

*Note: For an explanation of the Screen Tip button, see the first article via the link below.

This is a pretty easy to use part of the Hyperlink tool, and yet it is incredibly useful. Definitely keep it in mind the next time you are trying to figure out how to connect multiple spreadsheets together.

Coming up in Part III, we will be discussing how to use the Create New Document option of the Hyperlink tool.

Links to other parts: Part 1 Part II Part III.