Pages in macOS automatically detects website addresses (URLs) and email addresses you type and formats them as active links. You can edit these links or deactivate them so they appear and behave as normal text.
If you don’t want Pages to automatically detect links, you can turn off Smart Links in Edit > Substitutions (from the Edit menu at the top of your computer screen).
Edit or deactivate a link
- Click the link, click Edit, then make your changes.
- Turn text into a link
- You can use a word or phrase as a link without showing the URL or email address in your document.
- Select the text, click Insert in the toolbar, then choose Add Link.
- The link window opens with the selected text in the Display field.
- Enter the full URL in the Link field/
- Click Open to verify the link.
Turn off automatic formatting for links
- If you don’t want Pages to automatically format links as clickable text, you can turn off automatic formatting.
- Choose Edit > Substitutions > Show Substitutions (the Edit menu is at the top of your computer screen).
- Select the Smart Links checkbox.
- Click a button to replace all occurrences of formatted links in the document, or just in the selected text.
When Smart Links is turned on for the document, a checkmark appears next to Smart Links in the Substitutions menu. You can deselect it to turn it off, but existing links won’t change unless you select the text that contains them, then follow the steps above.
(This how-to is based on my experiences and info on Apple’s support pages — where the images sometimes come from.)
