How on earth do you hyperlink to say an excel document and get it to open IN excel.. I can get it to open in internet explorer, but for an Intranet site this is no good.. i need Excel to open the document.. Any help would be appreciated.

Cheers Anne :)

http://office.microsoft.com/downloads/2000/xlviewer.aspx

As long as the person HAS excel, and your file is named properly, it should OPEN in excel.

If they don't have excel, you should offer the download in the link up there, it's just a viewer for that program.

Unfortunately for you, the program in which is opens depends on how the end user has their machine configured I believe. There may be a way to influence it by doing some server configuration stuff (mime types, etc) but chances are you are on a shared host that doesn't allow that stuff.

If there's a cleverer (?) way I don't know it :(

Agh crap i got booted and have to re-type everything i just wrote..

Thanks for the help on this topic. I thought the same thing you guys did about if you dont have excel, then IE would open the doc.. makes sense.
I have excel on my computer, so does the whole office. When i click on the hyperlink, i get the excel doc opening in a half IE and half Excel looking page.. It has some excel menus, but it has the IE toolbar. THeres no print preview etc.. its a hybrid i guess.. which ^^^^s, cause i want it to open in a pure excel window..

If anyone wants to give it a try to prove me wrong, please do and let me know what results you come up with.

Cheers Anne :)

That's exactly my point: it's up to how the browser is configured, and you have no control over that (as far as I am aware, and I have some experience in this).

FYI, what you are seeing is Excel opening inside IE. Let me explain.... most Microsoft programs (including IE) are just objects. The object can open in whatever container wants to open it. What we normally consider to be IE, or Excel, or whatever, is just the default shell that Microsoft supply. So what you are seeing is the IE shell opening the Excel object.

That allows you to do neat things such as AvantBrowser, which is IE but with another shell someone wrote which they think it better than the Microsoft default one - Microsoft make it that way to encourage people to do stuff with it. If you use Front Page and click on "Preview", that's just Internet Explorer again, inside the Front Page shell. You'd be surprised how often you are seeing the IE object inside another shell and just not realising it's actually IE.

What you could do is encourage people to save it to their machine, and then open it, which will default to opening in Excel.