wait, really? Super easy way to remove all hyperlinks in a Microsoft Word document

Microsoft Word loves to turn email addresses into hyperlinks.

I hate this.

Mostly because I’m printing out contact lists for our office. You can’t click a hyperlink when you’re holding the document in your hand1. Word got rid of the old right click, remove hyperlink function a few versions ago.

And it frustratingly took me more than 30 seconds to find the solution on Google, so I figured I’d post this here in case someone else needs to figure this out as well. Here are the steps.

  1. Highlight all your text by pressing Command+A (or Ctrl+A on a PC).
  2. Then press Command+Shift+F9 (or Ctrl+Shift+F9 on a PC).
  3. Yes, that’s it.

If this helps one lonely Word user at 3 a.m. who doesn’t want to manually remove 300 hyperlinks, my life will be complete.

  1. Yes, technically you could hold a document in your hand and then, separately, click on a hyperlink on your computer. But that’s just a semantic loophole. [↩]