[Web App Devs] Office Docs Opening Issue

R

Ruthven

Veteran XX
Alright. I'll try and keep this as concise as possible. Hoping one of you has run into this problem.

We run a lot of reports in our application, and one of the output types is .CSV which inherently opens in Excel. Up to a month ago everything was peachy, you'd output the report (get your Open/Save As), excel would launch and display the report. When a couple of us upgraded to Office 2003 these reports when Opened would open within IE, and even worse when no target was specified within the frame itself that the report call was made. Not a huge deal at that point in time as most clients weren't upgrading to Office 2003 for awhile, etc, etc, engineer dance.

Now fast forward to this week when everyone is upgrading to SP2 (even those without Office 2003). It seems that whatever funk M$ put out in the Office 2003 release is also in SP2 (leading me to believe it's an IE tweak not office). Now it's becoming a problem and I need to fix it.

I'm open for ideas. I've tried everything. I've changed the extension on the file (from .csv to .whatever), changed the content type on the response (from text/csv to whatever) and nothing seems to work. Does anyone know if there is a browser setting or a setting on the file type itself that can be tweaked? For the life of me I can't find anything and searching on Google and MSDN has given me absolutely no results.

Halp,

Ruth

*Details that would help:*

JSP call via JS to a Servlet, doPost response back to the browser after the report is generation, csv is created, etc.
 
Last edited:
so right clicking on it and choosing 'open as' and then selecting MS Excel doesn't fix ur problem with associations?
 
Unfortunately it's a servlet stream so it's being generated and sent back to the browser on the response.

I was hoping I could tweak the Open property on the file type somehow...but I'm not very familiar with the syntax for that stuff.
 
do this:

just creating a new .txt file
rename it blahblah.cvs
right click on it and scroll down to 'open with'
select excel and 'always open with' option
let it open it and see if that fixes ur association.
 
It's not that Excel doesn't open it...it's that Excel opens it withing the browser window. Apparently this is come new feature. It's a problem because while you get your grid and your CSV spreadsheet and shit, you don't get all your Excel menus and features.

Hang on let me throw up an example.
 
oh so if there is a webpage with a link to a .csv file, instead of opening it in excel it opens it in the browser window same as a .pdf would?
 
CR-Ruthven said:
It's not that Excel doesn't open it...it's that Excel opens it withing the browser window. Apparently this is come new feature. It's a problem because while you get your grid and your CSV spreadsheet and shit, you don't get all your Excel menus and features.

Hang on let me throw up an example.
Click to expand...
then it has to be a setting within I.E. to change, so that it doesn't open it.
god damn pluugins.

did you check tools-?internet options->security->custom level?

FiEND said:
oh so if there is a webpage with a link to a .csv file, instead of opening it in excel it opens it in the browser window same as a .pdf would?
Click to expand...
yea.
 
FiEND said:
oh so if there is a webpage with a link to a .csv file, instead of opening it in excel it opens it in the browser window same as a .pdf would?
Click to expand...


Exactly my friend...with apparently no way to stop it. I even changed the target to "dummywindowname" and it just opens a new browser window and opens it in 'pretend excel' within a new IE window.
 
I'm curious as to whether or not you re-installed Excel again *after* your sp2 update.
might want to try it.
 
Actually I don't have SP2 here...for me it was the Office 2003 upgrade. I lived with it as a developer, but one of our QA guys (who does not have Office 2003) auto updated to SP2 yesterday and now he's having the problem too.
 
I gotta believe this is a problem for a lot of people out there. I can't believe I can't find shit about it. Granted you can work around it by saving the file, and then opening in excel afterwards but users can't handle that kind of complicated workflow :rolleyes:
 
edit:


Internet Explorer-->Tools-->Internet Options-->Program-->Mangage Add-ons


see if there is some sort of activeX plug-in that was installed.
 
Last edited:
yeah let me try that. I'm having shit luck with a new file type...and this version doesn't let me get to the mime types for the browser (or I'm retarded).
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top