Chris and Tom,
Thanks for your replies. I'm at an Apple store and managed to gather around me the uber-IT-nicks at the store (I know most).
This issue became a "project" for the group and to their chagrin, they didn't solve it. They were unsure why clicking on what appears to be a hyperlink in (Excel) Office for Mac would not simply take one to the web. We tried copying the URL and pasting it via various ways back into the worksheet.....didn't work.
I am definitely NOT an IT person, thus, I openly bow before all of you. But I had an idea that worked (sort of) but didn't quite get us there.
If one copies the URL from Excel (again, from Office for Mac) and pastes it into "Text Edit", it pastes in blue, however, you have to click it again to get a prompt that says something like "Hyperlink". We tried that and it worked, i.e., once pasted into Text Edit, it could be clicked and the link worked (took us to the document). We hoped by reversing the process, i.e., cut and pasting the workable link BACK INTO THE EXCEL SPREADSHEET that it would auto-magically work. Did not.
Tried the same by cut & pasting into Word....that was even worse.
(From the IATA website): "The International Air Transport Association (IATA) is the trade association for the world’s airlines, representing some 250 airlines or 84% of total air traffic. We support many areas of aviation activity and help formulate industry policy on critical aviation issues.
I point this out to indicate that IATA is a publicly-available organization, i.e., their published info (zillions of pages) is not proprietary no protected from public view.
From IATA's website: "The International Air Transport Association (IATA) is the trade association for the world’s airlines, representing some 250 airlines or 84% of total air traffic. We support many areas of aviation activity and help formulate industry policy on critical aviation issues."
It is involved with, for example, every recent airline crash in some way. Their investigation results are not published on their site for years (of course) but their extensive rules and regulations are. The Apple folks think that maybe our client (who provided us this worksheet; it's loaded with Macros and drop-down menus of all sorts) somehow protected the worksheet such that it disabled the simple "click the URL" that one would expect. If they DID protect it somehow, (if so, it was not intentional....it's not in their interest to do so -- they need the info).
The following is a screen shot of IATA text that we cut and pasted into an Excel worksheet for a client. What you see is exactly as it appears from the IATA site with the exception that the URL is embedded in the text and does not work once we copy & paste this into our worksheet. We (and Apple-ites from their store) tried everything we could think of to make it work: pull it out into another application, past it back in, etc.
After reading the paragraph and finding the URL, let me know if you have any ideas as to make it work. The client obviously doesn't want to have to go thru endless steps to make it work, inc. simply cutting and pasting the URL. The spreadsheet has a zillion URLs and to cut and paste each one for them to merely scan the contents for applicable to their business is not the best use of their time; all understand that. The point is that they need to (ideally) scan thru the info, clink on a link that they may be interested in, scan whatever they see, close it out and keep moving. They are a global giant & terrific company; they, like all of us arejust too busy to go thru many steps to get their info.
They have politely requested that our spreadsheets included links that work (their own IT department is probably north of several thousand, however, it's not their job to fix subcontractor's problems).
It may be as Chris says: making it into a workable link using Microsoft's Excel works but not in Mac's version. This problem has the Apple store stumped.
If you can solve this, I'm sure you will get boxes of apples from Apple for as long as you like. And my and the Apple guys thanks.
Here you go: