We have a situation where we deliver an Excel file along with several PDFs on
our product delivery DVD. The Excel file is an installation guide and one
column of various rows needs to have a hyperlink to a specific page in one of
the PDF files for more details on that item. The PDF files are generated
from Word documents. Since the page numbers and sections of the documents
will change, keeping the Excel document up to date was an issue. I wrote a
Macro function that goes through the speadsheet and looks in two specified
columns for a Word file name and a table of contents text string. The macro
finds all of the files used, opens each file and reads the TOC entries to
find the matching text and page number. From that information, a hyperlink
is created to jump to that page in the PDF.

Now, to open a PDF to a specific page, you put xxx.pdf#page=3 for example.
Unfortunately, Excel doesn't seem to like this functionality and converts the
# to a -. The hyperlink will open the pdf file but not to the page we need.
I wrote an html file to go in the same directory that would take the filename
and page number as parameters and that page would assemble the correct URL
and redirect to it. Unfortunately, Excel doesn't seem to like the parameters
(or the ? and & or their encoded equivalents). I've tried using the
xxx.htm?file=y.pdf&page=3 as the hyperlink address or using xxx.htm as the
address and file=y.pdf&page=3 as the subaddress but neither seems to work. I
also tried using just the pdf file as the address and the page=3 as the
subaddress but it didn't care for that either. I've tried using the pdf or
htm file without any path (they are in the same directory), and have also
prepended the openworkbook's path to both the pdf and htm file (with and
without file:// in front) and still no joy.

There have also been cases among all of these tests that called the local
htm file with the correct arguments but it would then not redirect to the
correct url.

Does anyone have any guidance for me on whether this can be done at all or
how to accomplish this? Is there any way to make this work?

Thank you very much.