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rgoodrow
rgoodrow
Participant
October 16, 2025
Question

How to copy/paste a URL hyperlink into an InDesign file

  • October 16, 2025
  • 1 reply
  • 306 views

I've tried googling, but I can't find an answer that doesn't involve a time-sinking endevour with the hyperlinks panel.

I have a Product Catalog InDesign file with some 200 products. Each product page is going to have a QR code for the print version, and a clickable link for the digital version. QR code was relatively easy. Created the image frame on the parent page, then dropped the corresponding qr code onto each product page.

What I can't figure out is how to copy/paste a hyperlink into a text box. InDesign keeps stripping out the hyperlink and only pasting the text. (For reference, I'm copying out of an Excel spreadhseet). What is the secret to copy/pasting a hyperlink (the equivalent of Click me 

<a href="https://myurl.com">Click me</a>

into a textbox in InDesign and have it keep both the link url & link text?

(I looked into data merge, but it doesn't look like it would apply to this, since all of the text boxes are in a single document, not creating multiple documents from a csv list with the same fields)

1 reply

Joel Cherney
Community Expert
Joel CherneyCommunity Expert
Community Expert
October 16, 2025

You most likely won't be able to copy and paste hyperlinks out of Excel and paste them into InDesign. Copying and pasting is generally not a good way to get content into InDesign, as you've already discovered. You could check the value of Edit -> Preferences -> Clipboard Handling and set it to "All Information" but I don't know if that will capture live hyperlinks in Excel. 

 

If it doesn't, you might try to use File -> Place to get the whole Excel document into InDesign, whereupon you should be able to copy and paste hyperlinks, assuming they survive the Place operation. Check the hyperlinks to make sure that they survived by looking at them in the Hyperlinks panel. 

 

Beyond that, I think I'd ask you to share a little bit more about the kind of workflow you are using, and why. If you're working on a product catalog and all of your source data is in Excel, then actually Data Merge might work for you. There's more than one merge type you could perform, but if you're not going to invest in a catalog-specific plugin like Easy Catalog or InCatalog, using Data Merge would most likely be faster than trying to build it manually. It's possible to do a multi-record merge, but even a boring normal merge doesn't create a bunch of different documents; it creates a single InDesign document with many pages. So if you can tell us a little bit more about what you need to make and what kinds of materials you have to hand, we might be able to make better suggestions. Because it sounds to me like you will probably need to learn how to use InDesign more thoroughly before starting your project. For example, if you can give us an idea of how your Excel inputs are structured, or a sample XLSX with a few fake products in it, we could show you how to use Data Merge to build some catalog pages. 

rgoodrow
rgoodrowAuthor
Participant
October 24, 2025

Appreciate the write-up. I'd prefer to use a Data Merge operation, as it reduces human error input. (Also, want to avoid purchased plugins as this is a once / year thing) Getting the data into CSV with parsed out LInk Title & Link URL would be easy (or any other data format). I did lookup mult-record merge, but everything I found indicates it's duplicating a set of content within the same page, which isn't what I need.

My setup is

* Document has 3-4 parent pages

* ~300 pages within the document could be using any of the parent pages in any order
Example:

* Page 1 - A: stuff

* Page 2 - A: stuff

* Page 3 - B: stuff

* Page 4 - A: stuff

* Page 5 - B: stuff

* Page 6 - B: stuff
so I'm looking for a way to fill in hyperlink data onto each page in the document. If I need to separate it into a list of Parent A links & Parent B links, that's also doable. (and really, if I can do it with hyperlinks, then I can do it with more of the copy that appears on the page) With the searches I was doing, I just didn't see a way to accomplish filling in hyperlink data onto each page where a placeholder or field would be using a data merge. When trying to use a Data Merge myself, it wanted me to place the fields onto a page (or parent page), but when exporting, it was only reflecting one row of data.

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