You can still achieve that with formatting properties and a few lines of VBA in your form.

Now you want your email addresses or URLs to be clickable and look like a link when displayed in a form in your applications GUI. You are storing your hyperlink addresses in a plain text format. Ok, I convinced you to go with my recommendation. Just be aware there are some limitations with that data type too. If you expect longer link addresses you might want to use a Memo/Long Text column. There might be cases where an URL’s address is longer than that, but usually this should be enough. The maximum length of a Short Text field can be up to 255 characters. I strongly recommend to use the plain (Short) Text data type to store your email addresses or URLs. Otherwise, if your data is only the actual link address, it will be written into the hyperlink column without changes and thus ending up being only the DisplayText of a not working hyperlink. If you insert a new record with data in the hyperlink column, you need to format the data to be inserted in the format used internally ( DisplayText# Address# SubAddress). Even if you do, it is more complex and difficult to work with the data from such a column later down the line. If you are not aware of the internal structure of the hyperlink data, you might see unexpected results when working with that data in VBA code.

So the original address is only the DisplayText now and the anchor sub-address has become the main Address. Access failed to recognize this and stored the data unchanged. The original address contained an anchor sub-address already. Pay particular attention to line 4 in the table above. This works well for the most common hyperlinks, but sometimes the result is mangled data. When entering, pasting or importing data in a Hyperlink column, Access will separate the text into the individual parts mentioned above. While on one hand it is convenient to have all this structured info in just one column, on the other hand it creates three problems at least. The additional protocol information is required to make the contents of the field an actual working hyperlink. I highlighted the parts of the stored data added by Access.

If you enter text manually or paste it into the field from the clipboard, the text entered gets analyzed by Access and, depending on the actual link text, additional info is added and the data is stored internally in a concatenated string in the format of DisplayText# Address# SubAddress#ScreenTip. It is a composite data type consisting of a DisplayText, the Address and optionally a SubAddress and a ScreenTip (Tool tip). The Hyperlink datatype is not plain text.

Storing data in a Hyperlink column will change the data you entered. Convenient, isn’t it? – Don’t do that! What is behind the Hyperlink data type? However, if you studied some of the example databases provided by Microsoft, you might be tempted to use a Hyperlink datatype in your table to store those addresses. Storing data such as email and web addresses (URLs) in an Access database sounds ridiculously simple. Photo by cocoparisienne, used here under CC0 licensing Issues with the Hyperlink data type in Microsoft Accessīy Philipp Stiefel, originally published May 23 rd, 2016

Mailto hyperlink in pdf not working