Open Office from a Web Page
Override IE's default behaviour to open Office documents in the browser window.

Introduction

By default, Internet Explorer is configured to host Office documents.

A Microsoft Knowledge Base article, "Office Documents Open in Internet Explorer (Q162059)" tells how to permanently disable this feature.

However, sometimes we're only occasionally interested in starting up the appropriate Office program.

This article outlines a few scripts that will enable to start up seperate copies of the Office applications (Word, Excel and Powerpoint). We will also load a web document in these programs. This way, the user has all he needs to work with these documents before saving the copy to local media.

Scope

To accomplish the task, we will use client-side ActiveX objects that are automatically installed when Office is installed, so there's no need to do any client-side configuration to make this method work.

However, these components are not marked as 'Safe for Scripting', the result of this depends on the client's security settings.

Intranet.

When the page is hosted on a Intranet server, the scripts will generate a security warning. When the user clicks yes, the Office application will be started and de web document loaded.

To switch off this warning, consider to add the Intranet site to the client's Trusted Sites.

Internet.

When the page is hosted on a Internet server, default security settings will prohibit to start these kind of components. The client will have no occasion to explicitly allow the start-up of Office applications.

To resolve this issue, consider to change the client's security settings for components 'not marked safe for scripting' from 'disable' to 'prompt'. Please do not change the setting to 'enable' as this blind acceptance is too dangerous on the Internet.

Personally, I'd advise against to use this kind of scripts from Internet sites.

The Scripts

Starting Word.

<script language="JavaScript">
  function startWord(strFile)
  {
    var myApp = new ActiveXObject("Word.Application");
    if (myApp != null)
    {
      myApp.Visible = true;
      myApp.Documents.Open(strFile);
    }
  }
</script>

You can now start Word with a hyperlink:

<a href="javascript:startWord('http://yoursite/test.doc')">Test.doc</a>.

As Word is running locally, mind to feed a full URL as a parameter if you want to open a web document.

Starting Excel.

<script language="JavaScript">
  function startExcel(strFile)
  {
    var myApp = new ActiveXObject("Excel.Application");
    if (myApp != null)
    {
      myApp.Visible = true;
      myApp.Workbooks.Open(strFile);
    }
  }
</script>

You can now start Excel with a hyperlink:

<a href="javascript:startExcel('http://yoursite/test.xls')">Test.xls</a>.

As Excel is running locally, mind to feed a full URL as a parameter if you want to open a web document.

Starting Powerpoint.

<script language="JavaScript">
  function startPowerPoint(strFile)
  {
    var myApp = new ActiveXObject("PowerPoint.Application");
    if (myApp != null)
    {
      myApp.Visible = true;
      myApp.Presentations.Open(strFile);
    }
  }
</script>

You can now start PowerPoint with a hyperlink:

<a href="javascript:startPowerPoint('http://yoursite/test.ppt')">Test.ppt</a>.

As PowerPoint is running locally, mind to feed a full URL as a parameter if you want to open a web document.

Conclusion

We gain from the fact that Office applications are fully Automation enabled. In fact, there are a lot more applications that can be communicated with this way.

Check out OLE Programmatic Identifiers at MSDN.

If you have corporate applications that feature the same kind of Automation interface, you may be able to do pretty much the same as shown here with Office.

The Office applications are started as seperate processes, with a user interface. This means that we can safely close the originating browser window; this won't close the Office application.

There's a lot more that can be done using the Office ActiveX interfaces. Start your exploration at MSDN!

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