open(.xls file, 'w') so that hyperlinks appear

[Lemniscate]

I feel kind of silly asking this question but I have a hard time with
the internal workings of MS products.  I have the Win32 Python book by
Oreilly, but I think I just have a learning block or something. 
Enough of that, here is my question:

I made a program that takes input from a file (text file with \n
splits).  I search a public database and find more links (using the
urllib.urlopen function).  I want to plug these links into Excel and
have them as functional links, but all I get is text (a Unicode
translation thing, I assume).  Is there a way to modify the output so
that they will show up as links in Excel?  I can send my code to
anybody who wants to see it (it is big and hairy so I don't want to
waste the space here).  Thanks