How do I create a calculated column to determine whether another column contains a link?

Question

I am evaluating column content visually to determine whether it contains a link. I'd like to automate that with a formula in a column that tells me whether any link exists. That's the first step - it will save a bunch of time because I can then filter by that column.

The second step is to determine whether the link(s) in the text are actually valid. That seems more difficult, so I'm starting with the first one only.

Thanks for your help!

Answer 1

The simplest thing you can do is to create the boolean calculated column (Yes/No) with the formula that would check if the column contains the characters that you know your links will contain.

Since there could be different types of links, you can modify the formula to your needs, but you can start with this simple one (change the [Col1] to your column name):

=IF(ISERROR(FIND("http",Col1)),"No","Yes")

It should be enough for most of the cases, beacuse it checks if the value in your column contains http. You should also check your values and see if it is necessary to put the :// part, because just checking for the http could give you some false positives.