Hyperlink fails when re-opening spreadsheet with error: "LINK TEXT" is not an absolute URL that can be passed to an external application to open it

My LibreOffice version is 5.3.6.1 (x64) on Win 8.1

I have an xlsx extension spreadsheet that has a hyperlink reference to pdf file irs_pub_915.pdf.
The spreadsheet file and the pdf file reside in the same directory location C:\temp\junk.

I have the following 2 cells in my spreadsheet:

cell A1 text content : irs_pub_915.pdf

cell A2 hyperlink function content: =HYPERLINK(“file://” & “/C:\temp\junk” & A1, “LINK TEXT”)

When I insert the hyperlink function into cell A2 and hover over cell A2, the following is displayed:

Ctrl-Click to follow link:file///C:\temp\junk\irs_pub_915.pdf

When I Ctrl-Click cell A2 the irs_pub_915.pdf opens as expected.

However, when I save, close and re-open the spreadsheet, when I hover over cell A2, the following is displayed:

Ctrl-Click to follow link:LINK TEXT

When I Ctrl-Click cell A2 the following message is displayed:

“LINK TEXT” is not an absolute URL that can be passed to an external application to open it.

The hyperlink appears to be losing track of the path to the external file.

Can anyone help me resolve this?

TIA

Luke

(A suggestion: Reduce empty lines.)

=HYPERLINK("file://" & "/C:\temp\junk\" & A1, "LINK TEXT") is definitely an invalid way of creating URLs. It’s wrong to just concatenate local paths with file://, because proper URLs don’t have \ and many other characters.

ACK !

The problem also occurs with simpler formulas. Tested in LO 5.4.3.2:

=HYPERLINK("http://www.google.com/"; "LINK TEXT")

The problem does not occur when saving as .ods format. So for this as well as many other reasons, I would recommend saving as .ods instead of .xlsx. This fixes the problem instantly.

Also, the problem did not occur when tested with Apache OpenOffice 4.1.3. Not sure in what version of LibreOffice the problem was introduced.

You could file a bug at https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/. There are a number of hyperlink-related bugs, many of which only apply to .xls or .xlsx. After a brief search, I did not see any that are exactly the same as the issue described here. The bug has been reported at the link given by @Lupp.

I cannot test with files that were originally made with MS Excel as I have none.
When I just made a test file with LibO V6.0.0.0Beta2 under Win 10 saved to OOXML (.xlsx) the bug was still present.

See https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/buglist.cgi?quicksearch=%20HYPERLINK%20XLSX&list_id=763377
and in specific bug tdf#97805.

The above linked bug was set RESOLVED WORKSFORME on 2019-03-13 for version 6.2.1.2.