Im trying to create an hyperlink inside the results from an sql query.

If I type the text manually into a cell, as in:
=HYPERLINK("HTTP://www.slashdot.org", "View")

it works fine (that is, it shows as "View" underlined, just like a
hyperlink, and when I click it, it opens the browser.

However, if this text is the column text of an SQL query (by using the
Database Query feature) , it displays incorrectly (it shows the
"=HYPERLINK..." text, instead of the friendly name text, but oddly enough,
it shows underlined. Futhermore, clicking it does nothing.

This appears to be a bug in excel, because in some (rare) ocassions, it
does display and work correctly.

Is there a way arround this?
Note that this, if it worked, would be a powerful feature, because one could
register a custom URL protocol handler (in fact this is what I want to use
it for, the http is just to simplify the question to this newsgroup), and be
able to "drill down" from the excel report into the application that
generated that data, by generating the appropiate url from SQL (for example,
in my case a URL looks like "TAOF://History/14/34", and when clicked, my app
will get that string as a command-line parameter (see for example

This allows developers to leverage the power of excel as the app's reporting
engine, while being able to comunicate both ways from app < -- excel.

Thanx for any help,

Zig Mandel