How to display XLSX files for download on public SharePoint Site

I ran into an interesting problem today where I had a SharePoint site setup with anonymous access permissions and I was getting reports that users could not download XLSX files from this site. After doing some digging I found that Excel Services for SharePoint was trying to launch the document as the default application instead of Excel from the desktop. This site showed me how to disable this functionality for XLSX files.

http://xinspace.com/sharepoint-prompts-login-when-opening-a-xlsx-file-on-a-publishing-site/

SharePoint Prompts Login when Opening a XLSX file on a Publishing SiteFebruary 2, 2010

Solution:

Edit the file "serverfilesExcelServer.xml" under C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extensions\12\TEMPLATE\XML

Comment out this line:

<Mapping FileExtension="xlsx" RedirectUrlTemplate= "/_layouts/xlviewer.aspx?id=|0″ NoGetRedirect="TRUE"/>

 

 

Comments

[Riva Uy]

Hi,

Whenever users click the existing XLSX link in our SharePoint site, they seem to get a broken link. DOCX and PPTX files work just fine.
I tried the solution in your article, but to no avail. Do you have any suggestions how I can try to resolve this issue?

Thank you.

[Anthony Casillas]

I know this post was written some time back, but this option will actually put you into an unsupported state.

While this seems like a harmless fix\work around, their are uncertainties around what other impact modifying this XML file could have.

[Ryan Fligg]

Anthony,

Definitely noted. This is our internal development SharePoint site so it is not exposed to the outside world and our finance team really need the ability to launch XLSX documents natively within SharePoint. This was our solution and I do understand this is an unsupported state. Thank you for noting it for those that are trying to attempt this in the future.

[Ryan Fligg]

Riva,

I did not dive that deeply into the issue. Once I found this solution it worked for our environment and I posted my notes in case others found it useful.

I would check http://msdn.microsoft.com under the SharePoint forums. They are generally very responsive for issues like this.

--Ryan