Monthly Archives: May 2007

Office 2007 document types and webservers

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Well, over the weekend some of the other sysadmins of the world provided the solution to the Office 2007 file download problems.

It’s all about the mime types. For those of you not in the know, a MIME type is an Internet Standard that is used to help webservers and e-mail servers know what kind of files are being served up and sent out. Check out the Wikipedia article for more.

So on an Apache webserver you need to add the following to your mime types file:

application/vnd.openxmlformats docx pptx xlsx

Thanks goes out to Vlad Mazek and his post on this one.

Now if only it was so easy for a Windows webserver running IIS. For the process on updating IIS, surf on over to the entry on David Oberton’s blog at a href=”http://uksbsguy.com/”>UK SBS Guy.

Microsoft wins and loses with Office 07 and IE compatibility

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So with the impending roll out of Microsoft Office 2007 here at work, we have discovered something interesting. Apparently IE 6 and IE 7 don’t understand how to deal with the new file types that were introduced with Office 2007.

For those of you who aren’t aware, with the introduction of Office 2007, Microsoft has moved to new new file format for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint called Open XML. The new extensions for the files have an x added to the end of the familiar Office file extensions. For more on the file types check out the Wikipedia entry Microsoft Office 2007 file extensions.

The behavior when attempting to download the files using IE is that the browser treats them as zip files and displays the familiar “Run, Save, Cancel” box after starting the download. The fun part is that Firefox 2.0.0.3 and Netscape 8.1.3 both check the file extension against the file types list of the OS and if the new file types are listed appropriately, they tell you the correct type of Office document that you are attempting to download. (Note: you only get the new file type definitions if you have installed Office 2007 or the Office 2007 File Compatibility Pack for Office 2003).

Good game, Microsoft. I really hope that you produce a fix soon.

For those searching for more information on this, here’s a couple of links I found on the problem:

http://www.tutorials-xe.com/ERRORS/docx-becomes/
http://www2.nau.edu/~d-elearn/faculty_support/tutorials/office2007/office2007.php