Pages: Getting Rid of Hyperlinks

So you're typing into a Pages document, and you've gotta include a Web address (like www.apple.com). The problem? Pages will automatically format the text as a hyperlink whenever you start a URL with “www” or “http.”

You could leave that part of the address off (and just type “apple.com,” for example), but you can also turn off this “feature” entirely. To do so, go to Pages> Preferences and click on the Auto-Correction tab first, then deselect “Automatically detect email and web addresses.”

Eureka! That'll turn it off for any future URLs you type. But now how do you fix any existing ones? After all, if you hover over one that you've got, you'll see the familiar little glove icon.

The glove icon is Mac-speak for “Click me, and we're gonna go to this link. LOL.” So to get rid of those, click on the Inspector icon in Pages' toolbar, and then select the Link Inspector (it's the second-to-last tab from the right).

Within that window, if you pick “Make all hyperlinks inactive,” you'll be able to edit the text of any of your existing links without worrying that clicking them will launch your Web browser. Then keep the Inspector window open as you click within your URLs, and just deselect “Enable as a hyperlink” for each one. 

Alternatively, if you have a ton of links to strip out and you don't want to do them one at a time, you could copy and paste your work into a plain-text document (within TextEdit, for example) to strip out all of the formatting, including those pesky links. Then you'd copy the unformatted text and paste it back into your Pages document, using either the typical Edit> Paste command or Edit> Paste and Match Style if you want to make the formatting fit what's around it. Be aware that if you do this, you'll lose any other rich text elements you've added, but hey, that may be small potatoes if you need to get rid of fifty ugly links.

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