I'm not going to debate the necessity of it, but I will say it's probably in there for performance reasons. That list has to load every time you edit a page and when it gets lengthy, it slows everything down. It's a tradeoff between people being annoyed because they have to wait and people being annoyed because they can't access all of their pages. Most people will never notice because they don't have more than 150 pages.
In the meantime, here's something you could do as a work-around. Copy and paste the page names into Word so that you can have a list with hyperlinks without having to go inside Canvas to find the one you want.
Preliminary Work in Excel
When we copy the data from Canvas, it will come over as a hyperlink. Unfortunately, Excel doesn't have a built-in function to get the URL from the hyperlink, so we need to create a user-defined function that will do it for us.
- Open Excel and start a new worksheet.
- Press ALT-F11 to open the Visual Basic for Applications editor.
- In the Visual Basic for Applications editor, click on Insert and choose Module
- Paste the function below that I got from ExcelTips . It will create a function called getURL() that will extract the hyperlink URL from a cell.
- Close the Visual Basic for Applications editor, but be sure to leave Excel open.
Function GetURL(rng As Range) As String
On Error Resume Next
GetURL = rng.Hyperlinks(1).Address
End Function
Creating the List in Word
Ultimately, this will be in Word, but we need to go through Excel for part of it to manipulate the data.
- Go to Pages, then click View All Pages. You will probably want to sort it in alphabetical order by title. Continue to scroll down the page. It will say "Loading More". Keep scrolling until you have the entire list of pages on the screen.
- Select all the information about the pages starting at the top and going to the bottom. Copy this and paste it into Excel. It won't look pretty, but that's OK, we've got to manipulate the data first. Mine filled up cells A1:E164, although the first column is the one that we need. The first actual page name was in cell A2.
Go to an empty cell in the same row as the first page name. I picked G2. Type =TRIM(A2) and press enter.This will strip spaces off the front or back of the title and give you the name without the hyperlink.
- Move to the cell to the right of this. In my case, it would be cell H2. Type =GetURL(A2) and press enter. This should give you the full path to the page.
- Copy Cells G2 and H2 down until you have all of your pages covered.
- Highlight the data in columns G and H. In my case, G2:H164. Press Ctrl-C for copy and then Alt-E, S, V for Paste Special with Values.
- Press Enter to overwrite the information. Alternatively, you could put it into a different range or even into a different spreadsheet.
- Press ^H for Search and Replace.
- Search for the beginning portion of the URL that contains the protocol and hostname. Basically, that's everything before the /courses/. In my instance, that would be https://richland.instructure.com. Do not include the slash at the end.
- Replace it with nothing.
- Click Replace All.
- At this point, you'll have two columns, one with the page name and one with the shortened URL that begins with /courses/.
- Go to the cell immediately to the right of the first page address. For me, it's cell I2. Type =HYPERLINK(G2,H2) and press enter. The G2 should be the page name and the H2 should be relative URL that begins with /courses/
- Copy this formula down so it repeats for every page name.
- Copy the last column, which contains the hyperlinks, and paste it into Word. The rest of this is done in Word.
- When you copied the data into Word, it copied it as a table and kept the formatting that you had in Excel. Not cool. In fact, you probably freaked out when you first pasted it.
- Click somewhere in the document so that you're actually in the list and the "Table Tools" menu pops up at the top. Choose Layout.
- Toward the right is a "Convert to Text" button. Click that and choose to separate the text with Paragraph marks.
- The entire list should be highlighted. If not, press Ctrl-A to highlight. Then click on the Normal or No Spacing style from the Home tab in Word. This will remove any formatting so that when you copy/paste into Canvas, it looks the same as all of the other hyperlinks. You probably want No Spacing if you have that many items. You may be tempted to make it a bullet list, but don't: If you do, the bullets will come through when you copy into Canvas.
- Save your Word file! That was a lot of work.
Using the List
When you need to access pages that are beyond the 150 limit (or anytime if you like), start by opening the Word document.
- Find the page you want in the Word document.
- Select and copy the page name
- Switch to the Canvas rich content editor
- Paste the information where you want it.
You could do that with just the pages at the end, but you may actually find it easier to do it this way than using what's built in.
If you find that you want the links but the text changes and is rarely the name of the page, you may want to just keep the Excel file with the shortened links and use it.
