Google Sheets provide a free online spreadsheet program. If you want to insert a URL into a cell in a Google sheet, the syntax is
=HYPERLINK(URL,cell_text). The cell_text is
the text displayed for the URL. It is an optional argument; if it isn't
provided, the URL will be displayed. The URL and cell_text need to be
enclosed in double quotes.
So, how do you specify cell text when that text includes quotation marks.
E.g., for a title of Fixing "To" Addresses in a Queued Message,
using
=hyperlink(http://support.moonpoint.com/blog/blosxom/2005/04/06#fixing-to-address","Fixing "To" Addresses in a Queued Message")
won't work, since the first double quote character appearing after the beginning
one before Fixing signals the end of the cell_text.
Often a backslash character, \ can serve as an
escape character
indicating that the character that follows isn't to be treated the way
it would normally be treated by software, i.e., any special significance
for the following character is to be ignored. But in this case that didn't
work. I still saw #ERROR! in the cell and a little red triangle in
the cell that when clicked on displayed Error: Parse. Nor would
using the &ldquote; and &rdquote;
that can be used in HTML coding to signify left and right double quotes.
That just resulted in that text being displayed with the rest of the
cell text. What I found did work was to use the double
quote character itself as an escape character, so that if
two double quotes are placed one after the other in cell_text,
a double quote will appear within the cell_text. E.g., in the above case,
=hyperlink("http://support.moonpoint.com/blog/blosxom/2005/04/06#fixing-to-address","Fixing ""To"" Addresses in a Queued Message") worked
to display Fixing "To" Addresses in a Queued Message for the cell
text. You don't need to escape any single quotes within the cell_text,
only the double quotes. You can also escape double quote characters within
a URL the same way.
