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Removing destination links

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I have a cell in a spreadsheet that is linked to multiple destinations in Editor. Some of the destinations no longer exist as the pages were removed. How can I remove these specific destinations showing in Link Properties in my spreadsheet without removing the remaining destination links that I want to keep in place?
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8 comments

Date Votes
  • Mike
    Hi Sylvia,

    Great question! To confirm, when you are looking at Link Properties, you see destinations still in your list that are going to sections that have since been removed from your destination document, correct?

    If that is the case, my suggestion would be to run a project validation so clear up the document and the links that have been removed. This will look through all the docs in your project and clean them up, most notably your Spreadsheet and the Document that the links are connected to. This feature is found under File > Validate > Project.

    Note, that depending on the size of your project and the number of docs and/or links, this may take it a few minutes to run. As a choice, you can also validate the document only, which will also pull up any documents linked to it.

    Once that is run, I'd check out the Link Properties again to see if the destination link still show sup. If that does not clear it up, let me know and we can keep digging.

    Give me a holler if you have any questions on the above, or you have any additional questions. Thanks for reaching out and chat with you soon. Cheers!
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  • Brent Miller

    This post is pretty old, but the same question popped up for us. However, the File > Validate > Project option no longer appears on our menu. Is there an updated workaround? When we copy a document with duplicated links, it pulls all historical documents (which linearly increases at each period...that requires we delete a growing number of linked documents). If we can clean up the legacy destination links, it may avoid this behavior). Thank you.

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  • Mike

    Hi Brent!

    Welcome to the community, and thanks for the question.

    You are correct, that option to validate the project is no longer a feature in Workiva as it was party of our classic platform. The best solution now to find these possible errant files and links is to run a Linked Files Report, which is accessible from the right-click menu in Home. This should help show what is all linked to and from your chosen file. Here's a Help article on this process: https://support.workiva.com/hc/en-us/articles/360036000671-Use-the-Linked-Files-Report.

    Let me know if I've missed the mark or you have any additional questions for me. Cheers!

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  • Brent Miller

    Thank you Mike, and actually started with that report (strangely, the destination links did not appear in that Linked Files Report...). Since posting, I've seen some related issues from folks where the destination link is present in a long-deleted file (which is our case as well). If I'm gathering the right information from the current community comments, there is presently no way for end users to address the issue and will need to escalate to their relationship team so that Workiva system administrators can remove links. Is that correct?

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  • Mike

    Howdy! Hmm... did you also choose the option to Create a Spreadsheet of File Links? I would think that should call out where they are.

     I'll confirm with our experts too if you'd need to contact a Workiva rep to remove these and/or if they have any best practices here.

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  • Mike

    Quick update here Brent Miller. Two things for ya. First, if the trashed file containing the source link is long since gone (i.e. since emptied from the Trash) it seems their quickest resolution at this point will be to make a copy of the file with the destination link, and being the source is gone, the copy should not include the destination link. However, if the files are in the trash but not emptied, you'd need to restore them and unlink, or unlink the destination. With any luck, the Spreadsheet of File Links might point those out to you.

    Secondly, there is a request to auto-unlink once a file is emptied from trash. I'm definitely happy to add you as a requestor there, if interested.

    While this was only a partial answer, hopefully it helps some. Let me know if you need anything else or have questions.

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  • Brent Miller

    Thank you Mike, and appreciate taking the time to track down. Please add us as a requestor to the feature enhancement as we're highly interested. Meanwhile, we'll explore the alternatives mentioned. 

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  • John Thompson

    So is it best practice to remove the the links in the destination document first, before you delete the document? We have lots of legacy destination documents that we no longer use but they are still linked to multiple source files. Some links within the source documents are still valid so we don't want to delete any source links by accident.

     

    So my proposal is to:


    1) Go through all destination files (all documents and presentations), if they are no longer required then remove all destination links (green triangles) 

    2) This should remove any source links (blue triangles) from the source documents (all spreadsheets), if and only if, all the destination links have been deleted (if they haven't then I need to keep that source document)

    3) If there are no source links (blue triangles) in the source documents then I can safely delete the source document. Although think I still need to check for formula references? Is there an easy way to spot them?

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