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When I click on excel link the file opens in browser as unreadable code

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My client has a website with a link to their Excel price sheet. The link is below. When I click on the file I am able to save to my computer or open it up to view. When they click on the link it opens up into an unreadable web page of special codes. I have sent a screen shot of it. They are using Windows 10, Excel excel 14.0.7166.5000 32 bit and Firefox 45.0.2.

Link to excel price sheet: http://blackswanmfg.com/index.php/list-price-sheet

My client has a website with a link to their Excel price sheet. The link is below. When I click on the file I am able to save to my computer or open it up to view. When they click on the link it opens up into an unreadable web page of special codes. I have sent a screen shot of it. They are using Windows 10, Excel excel 14.0.7166.5000 32 bit and Firefox 45.0.2. Link to excel price sheet: http://blackswanmfg.com/index.php/list-price-sheet
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All Replies (3)

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Hi alexismya, this looks to be a configuration issue on the server.

Some web servers do not know what content type to send for the newer Office formats such as xlsx and docx so they send "text/plain" which Firefox tries to display in a tab, or a generic binary file type, which forces a download. In this case, as shown in the attached screenshot, the server is sending "text/plain".

For the webmaster's reference:

This thread has the necessary file extension to content-type associations for Office OpenXML format documents:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4212861/what-is-a-correct-mime-type-for-docx-pptx-etc

For example, to send the content type "application/pdf" with files that have a .pdf file extension:

AddType application/pdf .pdf

I believe those lines can be entered in the server config file httpd.conf, but if permissions do not permit that, an .htaccess file often is used. Because it's easy to break a website with a change to any configuration file, the .htaccess file should be tested in a new folder that won't affect users of the live site.

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That is a ZIP archive as you can see by the PK signature. You will have to save the files as a ZIP archive (.zip) and extract the files with an archive manager.

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It's true that the Office Open XML formats (xlsx, docx, etc.) are zip archives, but Microsoft Office applications consume them in their compressed form rather than requiring that you decompress them first.

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