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To open this workbook, your computer must have a version of Microsoft Excel installed and your Web browser must support opening files directly from Excel in the

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  • Last reply by russell76

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Im trying to open an excel file from a shared website, i used to be able to open them in Excel when i used Internet Explorer, now all i see is the spreadsheet in a webpage, when i try to open in the file in Excel (there is a tab that asks do you want to open in excel) i get a message "To open this workbook, your computer must have a version of Microsoft Excel installed and your Web browser must support opening files directly from Excel in the browser."

Im trying to open an excel file from a shared website, i used to be able to open them in Excel when i used Internet Explorer, now all i see is the spreadsheet in a webpage, when i try to open in the file in Excel (there is a tab that asks do you want to open in excel) i get a message "To open this workbook, your computer must have a version of Microsoft Excel installed and your Web browser must support opening files directly from Excel in the browser."

Chosen solution

Do you have Excel installed?
If so, can you use Internet Explorer for that website?

AFAIK, Microsoft doesn't have an add-on for Firefox to allow Excel to be opened from inside Firefox. It may or may not work properly depending upon whether that website uses a proper MIME-type for the files it delivers.

Another way of handling that would be via Open Office or Libre Office; both are open source (free) programs which will display XLS (Excel) files, and both programs have a Mozilla browser plugin to allow Firefox to open the "Calc" part of those programs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_OpenOffice

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Chosen Solution

Do you have Excel installed?
If so, can you use Internet Explorer for that website?

AFAIK, Microsoft doesn't have an add-on for Firefox to allow Excel to be opened from inside Firefox. It may or may not work properly depending upon whether that website uses a proper MIME-type for the files it delivers.

Another way of handling that would be via Open Office or Libre Office; both are open source (free) programs which will display XLS (Excel) files, and both programs have a Mozilla browser plugin to allow Firefox to open the "Calc" part of those programs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_OpenOffice

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thanks for the reply, very helpful, much appreciated.