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Prevent IE from opening Office files inside browser
Note: This tip for PC users applies only to Internet Explorer, running under Microsoft Windows 2000 or XP.
Are you tired of Internet Explorer's insistence in opening Microsoft Office files (Word, Excel or PowerPoint) in a captive window within the browser? If you would rather have IE open Excel or Word documents in the native applications (and even give you a choice to save it to disk), here's how you can do it...
-
First open any folder (My Documents or a regular file folder) and click the "Tools" menu item, then select
.
-
On the resulting dialog box, click the "File Types" tab (it may take a bit of time to build the list), then scroll in the "Registered file types:" window until you find the appropriate extension(s) for the files whose behavior you want to change (DOC for Word files, XLS for Excel files, or PPT for PowerPoint files) and highlight (i.e., click) it.
-
Click on the
button
to get to the settings for this file type (in the Edit File Type
dialog).
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UNCHECK the "Browse in same window" option, and, if you want to have the browser ask whether to save or to open the file each time you encounter one, check the "Confirm open after download" box.
You're done! Now, whenever you click a link to a file having the extension you just changed, Windows will ask you whether to save the file to disk or to open it... and if you choose open, it will do so in the native application for the file, rather than in an embedded (and limited capability) browser window.
