Unable to opened WORD 2007 documents without first saving to hard drive when accessing from a link off of web page.

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The agency I work for posts a large volume of WORD 2007 documents (.docx files) to an FTP server each month for our Board members to review. Each month we create an html document with a list of links that points to each document which resides on our Windows 2003 ftp server. From my PC, I can click on a link and a dialog box comes up and asks whether I want to open the file or save it to my local hard drive. If I click open, then it launches MS WORD and then opens the document. This is the desired behavior that I want for our all of our users. Unfortunately when other users in the agency attempt to open a WORD document from the web page, they get the same dialog box but when they click on the open button, another dialog box comes up with a message stating that the file must be saved. It will not allow the user to simply view the file. The file has to be saved to the users hard drive first. Can somebody tell what setting I need to change or program I need to download to correct this problem?

Thank you.

Posted 22-Oct-15 12:02pm

scorchey

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phil.o 22-Oct-15 18:25pm

Do they use the same browser as yours? Are their network connections on the same subnet as yours and the ftp server's? There are a bunch of factors that can be considered. What is the exact error message of the message box, as well as its title?

Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov 22-Oct-15 18:51pm

Believe me, even if the file is "opened", it is actually download and saved locally first. Nothing here prevents the users from "viewing" the file, except some shell settings (file type settings, default application for a file type).
—SA

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Sergey Alexandrovich Kryukov · Answer 1 · 2015-10-22T12:59:00

None. Please see my comment to the question. If you are only responsible for the site, it's not your responsibility. People are downloading files to their local computers. It can be anything: the file types may not be properly set, the software may miss or malfunction, or a user is a lame, which happens very often. You cannot deal with that, unless you personally administer all those client systems, which would be a trivial thing totally unrelated to software development and other topics of this site.

But of course, this is not a very good, to provide data in proprietary and non-free format, such as Word. Even though the modern format is open, it has nothing to do with W3 standards. The client systems cannot guarantee that they are set up to handle these files, despite the widest popularity of Open XML document format, even on non-Microsoft systems. What happens is just thee most trivial, stupid and common anti-pattern, but purely organizational anti-pattern, which, again, has nothing to do with software development.

—SA