We have a script that collates data from a couple databases and generates some Excel spreadsheets (with a *.xls extension) on the web server based on this data. The sheets themselves are a mix of XML and HTML as per some article I can't seem to locate any more on Technet...
Most all of the computers that use the Intranet are using IE6 (no comments on this please, not in my control), and we have a mix of Office 2000 and Office 2003 (again, not in my control).
All the Office 2000 computers and only a handful of Office 2003 computers will open the sheets in Excel (the expected behaviour), but some of the Office 2003 computers will open the sheets in the IE window - and its confusing the hell out of the less-than-technical users that have run into this.
For the life of me I have been unable to reproduce the settings, or find what checkbox I need to check/clear to stop those few computers from opening Office documents in the browser. Does anyone know where this is?
Alternately, is there something I can do on the server end to force the client to open in Excel?
Lastly, we are looking at deploying Office 2007 some time in the near future - am I going to have to go through this again?
2 questions:
If they're opening in Excel within IE and have .xls extensions, there's this:
This is true for all Office 2003 formats.
If that is what fixes it, then there is nothing you can do on the server end. It's a client config. If not, you could try hard-coding a mime-type in your web server for .xls using application/vnd.ms-excel.