Today we noticed that when accessing our OWA with IE8, Office 2007 file types (xlsx, docx, etc) are not being downloaded correctly.
IE8 wants to save them as .zip files.
At first, I thought this might be a IIS server, not having the Office 2007 file types MIME Types setup correctly. But that turned out not to fix it.
The fix? Add your OWA's URL to your IE8's trusted sites list.
UPDATE: Unsurprisingly, the same is true for SharePoint, or at least SharePoint 2003. Same fix.
7 comments:
Thanks for the solution. This one had me scratching my head for about a week...
Thanx! We were getting so much crazy with this trying to install dll's, upgrades... and nothing.
So easy!
Thank you!
Wow, thank you indeed! This is a ridiculously easy solution and there is no reference to these easy wins on any of the Microsoft sites I visited today.
I came on this page randomly in an unrelated Google search, but the truth is that Office 2007 files are, in fact, zip files. Take a .docx file and rename it .zip, and you can unzip it to see a folder hierarchy of XML files. Guess it just doesn't trust the MIME type under certain security settings.
Here's an interesting take on the problem:
http://windowsnerd.com/2009/04/17/xlsx-and-docx-are-being-saved-as-a-zip-file-in-explorer/
If you look, there is a setting in the Advanced Settings area of Internet Options that specifies whether downloaded content is handled based on its extension or its content. Since zip files have zip headers, I'm sure this is why the "Internet zone" treats the files one way, and the "Trusted Sites" zone treats them another.
Ugh, thanks for this. I just switched to Win 7 and was using IE8 to download trusted Office 2007 files only to run into this problem with no obvious way of fixing it. I was apoplectic for about 10 minutes trying to download an Office file for work, which under any other circumstance in the past has worked without fail, yet this time all I got was a ZIP. Unbelievably stupefying that A) this problem is a security measure with no discernible warning whatsoever, and B) I have to search the internet far beyond MS's own support documentation online in order to find out how to fix it.
Unreal. No my blood pressure can equalize again.
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