Have you ever tried to style a hyperlink in PowerPoint and wondered why you can’t remove that underline?! You’re not alone. Here’s the deal: a hyperlink underline is not the same as a text underline—and unfortunately, it can’t be turned off through standard formatting options.
But there’s a smart workaround, or as some might say, a “hack.”
The Problem: Hyperlink Underlines Behave Differently
In PowerPoint, when you add a hyperlink (to a website or email), the text automatically becomes underlined and blue, or the color that is assigned to the hyperlink color in the template color scheme.
The text color is treated like all text color – it can be changed to any color while keeping the hyperlink interactivity intact. As an example, when we want to deemphasize a hyperlink, we change the text to black or white to match the other text on the slide.
The good news is that the hyperlink underline color does change with the text color. However, changing the hyperlink underline is different. This underline is part of PowerPoint’s hyperlink styling—not a standard underline that can be toggled on or off. But selecting the hyperlink text and using the underline button, or keyboard shortcut, will not remove the hyperlink underline.
The Workaround: Add a Custom Underline
To take control over the appearance of your link text, including the underline color, here’s a clever trick:
- Select the hyperlink text
- Open the Font dialog (Ctrl + T, or Right Click > Font or Home Tab> Font dialog box)
- Update Underline Style to a solid line (Single line or Heavy line usually works well)
- Then, choose your Underline Color—any color you want!
The color of the text does not change, but visually, the hyperlink underline color is now what you selected in the Font dialog box.
So, it is possible to have hyperlink text and its underline be different colors!
What you’ve done is layer a custom underline on top of the hyperlink’s default underline—visually overriding it with your style (just to make it clear, we are covering up the hyperlink underline with another underline).
TIP: If the slides have a solid color background, one option to make the hyperlink underline not seen is to set the hyperlink underline color to the color of the background. For example, here is the same hyperlink as above, but instead of setting the underline color to orange, it is now white to match the slide background.
ISSUE: Changing the underline color does have an issue. The underline is not “under” the text; it is on top of it. So, our hack of changing the underline color to white to match the while slide background above, shows up in the descender letters as white “dashes.”
But what if we trick PowerPoint by setting the underline for just the descender letters to the text color? Unfortunately, because the underline is the character width, not just the visible character, this trick doesn’t work. ☹
With some work, we can “hack” our way into having no visible hyperlink underline. To do this, we will manually remove the hyperlink from each descender letter, to create the effect. Of course, the new issue is that your mouse will change from hyperlink to non-hyperlink as you roll over the letters.
This is a lot of tedious steps, but it creates the visual aesthetic expected of TLC Creative when delivering a presentation (you decide if the added formatting time is needed for your project!).
Removing the Hyperlink Entirely
If you just want the text without the hyperlink styling:
Select the text within the text box, Right-click the link > Hyperlink > Remove Hyperlink
TIP: Select the hyperlink text and use the keyboard shortcut “Ctrl K” to open the hyperlink dialog box.
This turns the text into plain, non-linked text, letting you format it however you like. No underline, and the text color is the text color of the other text. But also, no hyperlink.
Credit Where It’s Due
This smart workaround was shared by Sandy Johnson with Troy Chollar live during Episode 225 of The Presentation Podcast, around the 22-minute mark. It’s one of those subtle tricks that can make a big difference in professional design.
-The TLC Creative Design Team