How to Remove All Hyperlinks at Once in Microsoft Word

When assembling reports, research papers, or documentation in Microsoft Word, copying text snippets from web browsers, online articles, or PDF documents frequently carries over dozens of unwanted hyperlinks. These embedded web addresses appear as bright blue, underlined text strings scattered across your paragraphs. While hyperlinks are helpful in digital web pages, they clutter printed manuscripts, trigger accidental browser navigation during editing, and look unrefined in formal business proposals.

Removing hyperlinks one by one—by right-clicking each link and selecting “Remove Hyperlink”—is intensely tedious on documents containing dozens or hundreds of references. Fortunately, Microsoft Word provides built-in keyboard shortcuts and field-unlinking functions that strip every hyperlink from your document in a single second while preserving your original text. In this guide, you will learn the fastest and most reliable methods to remove all hyperlinks at once in Microsoft Word across Windows and Mac.

Why Strip Multiple Hyperlinks from Word Documents?

Eliminating embedded links across your manuscript offers several practical advantages:

• Ensures consistent document typography: Replaces distracting blue underlines with your document’s default font family, colour palette, and heading hierarchy.
• Prevents accidental navigation: Avoids interrupting typing flow when clicking inside text blocks that accidentally launch your web browser.
• Prepares clean copy for export: Guarantees that exported PDFs or physical prints do not contain dead, broken, or sensitive internal intranet URLs.

Method 1: Use the Universal Keyboard Shortcut (Fastest)

In Microsoft Word, hyperlinks are internally structured as active field codes. You can permanently unlink all fields—converting active links into standard editable text—using a single global keystroke:

1. Open the document containing the unwanted hyperlinks in Microsoft Word.
2. Select your entire document by pressing Ctrl + A on Windows (or Cmd + A on Mac). Every paragraph, table, and heading will be highlighted.
3. Press the unlinking shortcut:
   • On Windows: Press Ctrl + Shift + F9. (On laptops where function keys are mapped to media controls, press Ctrl + Shift + Fn + F9).
   • On Mac (macOS): Press Cmd + 6 (or Cmd + Shift + F9).

Instantly, every blue hyperlink throughout your entire document converts into clean, static text. The anchor words remain intact, but the underlying URLs and blue styling are stripped.

Method 2: Remove Hyperlinks from a Specific Selection

If your document contains footnotes or specific references you wish to keep, but you want to purge links from a single pasted section:

1. Highlight only the paragraphs containing the hyperlinks you wish to remove using your mouse or keyboard.
2. Press Ctrl + Shift + F9 (or Cmd + 6 on Mac).
3. Only the selected text will be unlinked, leaving any URLs elsewhere in your document untouched.

Method 3: Prevent Hyperlinks When Pasting Text

To avoid accumulating unwanted hyperlinks in the first place when copying content from the internet:

• Keep Text Only: After copying web text, right-click inside your Word document and choose the Keep Text Only paste option (represented by a clipboard icon with a capital letter “A”). Alternatively, press Ctrl + Shift + V in modern Word versions.
• Set Default Paste Behaviour: Navigate to File > Options > Advanced. Under the Cut, copy, and paste section, set “Pasting from other programs” to Keep Text Only.