How do I get rid of hyperlinked text in PowerPoint?

Well, I know exactly what you're talking about and rather to my amazement, it appears that there isn't any way to disable the "automatically hyperlink web addresses" capability in Microsoft PowerPoint on the Mac!

Let's see what you're talking about, to start. You open up a PowerPoint presentation, type in a web address like "www.something.com", and it's instantly transformed into a clickable link. Not good! To fix the individual link, right-click (or Ctrl-click, since we're Mac folk) to get a contextual menu:

Choose Hyperlink --> Edit Hyperlink... and now you can edit quite a few characteristics of your link, if you're so inclined:

What you really want, however, is to click on the lower left corner, the "Remove Link" button.

Done. Unfortunately, there's no preference I can find, at least, to permanently disable this autoformat capability.

You can in Microsoft Word, however, which is worth showing here just so you can fix that problem, at least! :-)

On a Mac, click on Tools --> AutoCorrect...:

In this program, when you get to the AutoCorrect window there are lots more options:

I've highlighted the key choice, and that's what you want to change: "Replace as you type" "Internet paths with hyperlinks". Turn that off, and at least in Microsoft Word, you'll be able to safely type in email addresses and website URLs without them being automatically reformatted as hyperlinks.

If you're in Word for Windows rather than the Mac OS X version of the Microsoft Office cornerstone app, you can disable autoformating of email addresses and Web site addresses by choosing Tools --> AutoCorrect Options...:

and then unchecking "Replace as you type" "Internet and network paths with hyperlinks":

It's possible that there's a preference you can change in PowerPoint to disable this autoformat capability, but I can't find it, and it's not mentioned in the PowerPoint help system. Anyone have a tip on this one?