Links to interesting iNat observations from an Excel worksheet can no longer be opened.
This is very annoying – has anything changed on the iNat side?
If I paste the same link into an Outlook mail, it still works, so it’s not a general MS issue.
Screenshots and examples would be helpful to help diagnose the issue for you. No one else has reported any issues with accessing iNat observation links lately.
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Did you try other links in the Excel? It could be an Excel issue
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Forgot to mention that links to other websites still do work from Excel.
I’ve been using iNat obs. links in Excel for several years now,
and I never had a problem until mid-March or so.
When I now click on any of these links, a popup appears with the inscription (example translated from German);
„https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/338200972 could not be opened. The requested information cannot be downloaded."
(I think screenhots cannot say more here.)
The used Excel version is quite old (2013), but did work properly all the time.
So I really wonder what the hell has changed now.
Just tried this → https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/links-to-inat-obs-dont-work-anymore/77144/4 → it does work !
And another obs.: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/69611841 → failed.
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i noticed that recently if i open an observation in a new private browser window, iNaturalist will go through a bot check first. it’s possible this bot check could interfere with Excel’s ability to recognize that it’s opening a webpage. you might be doing something in your browser that clears cookies when you close it or something like that. i would think that once you’ve cleared the bot check the first time, you shouldn’t have to go through it again unless you’re doing some aggressive privacy stuff.
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Maybe this has something to do with measures against AI ?!
By chance I read on https://reptile-database.reptarium.cz :
„We had to temporarily remove additional information because it was scraped off by several AI companies that sell this data to their customers.“
Blocking access as a last resort against AI ?
(Just a little brainstorming, I guess it probably won’t lead to anything.)
open the observation in your default browser and leave it open. then go to excel, and try opening your link. does the link still fail to open?
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- opened https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/69611841
- set this link into an excel
- click link → same error popup
btw → same problem in Word, but not in Outlook.
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if excel still refuses to open a link even when you have an existing browser window open with an iNaturalist observation, then i’m not sure what to tell you. unless someone can reproduce your particular setup, it’s going to be difficult to solve whatever the problem is. it’s probably some issue with either your browser setup, your office setup, or possibly even some sort of corporate security setup (if you’re running excel from a company machine / network). whatever the problem is, i doubt there’s much that iNaturalist staff can do about it.
if you save your document to OneDrive, you could always access it from office.com, onedrive.com, or some other cloud version of Excel, and i would expect links there to open just fine.
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It’s all private equipment.
And there were no software changes,
just the regular firefox updates.
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it doesn’t matter if you didn’t make any changes recently. if you had setups all along that would handle iNaturalist’s new bot check poorly, then you had the problem all along and just never encountered a situation where it could be triggered.
try the OneDrive thing. that should at least allow you to open the links from your existing document.
unfortunately, cloud working is not possible for me b/c there is no fiber optic connection here, especially the upload speed is much too slow
no idea how to deal with this dilemma ,…
well, just copy the link address from Excel and paste it directly to your browser to open it then. or use a different sort of document to store your links. (ex. some iNaturalist users store links in journal posts and iNaturalist profile pages.) i’m not sure what to tell you other than that.
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Thank you very much for your time anyway !
If you use the Run dialog (Win + R) and just paste in the URL, does it work?
that works – but what advantage should that have over directly typing in the browser address bar?
if you’re not using advanced features in Office 2013, you could also try using LibreOffice instead.
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I’ll consider everything - to find the least cumbersome way …
Odd, I did the same with that and a handful of other links in Excel and all of them opened just fine.
Running: Office Home 2024 Windows 10
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Office 2021, 2024, and any of the 365 or cloud versions are going to use more modern bits to do web-related stuff. I think any version prior to 2021 will use the old (Trident) Internet Explorer engine to do stuff related to the web. i think this is true when deciding what to do with a URL, even if it ultimately opens a webpage in a modern browser window. i think the issue might be that the bot check involves a redirect that the old Trident engine might not interpret well or something like that.
it’s possible that there was a patch for such issues back in the day, but if you didn’t install such updates back in the day, it might be too late to make such updates to an unsupported version of Office. so short of using a cloud or 365 version of the programs or updating to a more modern perpetual version of the application, using LibreOffice should effectively resolve the issue.
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