If you wish to know whether a cell holds a Uniform Resource Locator (URL), such as
http://example.com, in
Google Sheets you can use the ISURL function.
E.g., if I wanted to know whether cell A5 contains a URL, elsewhere in the
spreadsheet I could use the formula =ISURL(A5). The value returned
will be either TRUE or FALSE. Note: this will return
the Boolean
value TRUE or FALSE only if the text in the cell is a URL. If, instead, I
have =hyperlink("http://superuser.com","Super User"), i.e., I
have text in the cell that is hyperlinked, the value will be FALSE, because, in the
example, the text that appears in the cell will be Super User.
This function is not available in
Microsoft Excel, at least as of Excel 2013 for Windows and Microsoft
Excel for Mac 2016 (version 15.29), which is part of
Microsoft Office 2016 for OS X and macOS systems. Nor is it available for
Apache OpenOffice
Calc, at least as of version 4.1.1. If you try using ISURL as a formula
in those applications, you will see #NAME? appear in the cell
where you place the formula, since its usage is an incompatibility between
those versions and Google Sheets.
The ISURL formula will return TRUE for other URLs besides HTTP or HTTPS ones. E.g., FTP and mailto URLs will also result in a value of TRUE. E.g., if a cell contains any of the following URLs, an ISURL formula that checks the content of the cell will return TRUE.
http://example.com
https://www.example.com
ftp://ftp.microsoft.com
mailto:someone@example.com
