I’ve been working on a new teaching system for a couple of weeks, and finally we got to the stage where some of the work needed to be marked by hand. Although I had completely overlooked the fact that some of the students would be submitted Word 2007 files, I realized this wouldn’t be a problem since they can be accessed using Word 2003 using a patch or by simply installing 2007 for the member of staff.
However, a nasty shock was in order for me when a number of staff members said they couldn’t access some of the student’s files. After some investigation it turned out that the files causing a problem were the Word 2007 files. I couldn’t understand what the problem was until I stepped outside of my nice warm Firefox environment and fired up Internet Explorer 6. Apparently when you try to download a Word 2007 file using IE6 it detects the file as a zip file. I thought this was a little strange but continued to look at possibilities and got a colleague running IE7 to test it. Again a “.zip” file appeared on the desktop instead of “.docx”. Completely confused by the whole situation we continued to test and installed Microsoft Office 2007 to see if that would allow Internet Explore 7 to download the file as intended. Guess what, it didn’t work!
Now for someone like myself this isn’t a problem, since not only am I sensible enough to run Firefox, but also can easily spot that the file should have been a word file and rename the extension appropriately. However, many of our users here in Psychology arn’t that savy. So a bit more searching in the bows of Internet Explorer 6 and 7 and we came across the option to stop IE from trying to work out the file type based on it’s content rather than it’s extension. Surely disabling this feature, which can be useful would solve the problem. Alas no, instead of trying to download the file it display garbage on screen and when you right click to download the file it tries to save a “.txt” file instead of leaving it alone.
Guess this is just another good reason why everyone should ditch Internet Explore and move over to the more user friendly Firefox.
UPDATE:  After some searching about on the internet I have found out that the problem can be fixed by adding some sort of definition to the Apache config file.  Apparently Internet Explorer is trying to be clever and determine the correct file type of the file you are downloading and then append this new file extension to the file.  Of course you can download the file with the .zip extension and then just rename the file but for many of the users in the department that just adds further complications and more chances of something going wrong for them.
[...] Mr-F wrote an interesting post today on Internet Explorer doesnâÄôt download Word 2007 files properlyHere’s a quick excerptCompletely confused by the whole situation we continued to test and installed Microsoft Office 2007 to see if that would allow Internet Explore 7 to download the file as intended. Guess what, it didn‚Äôt work! … [...]
[...] Mr-F wrote an interesting post today on Internet Explorer doesnâÄôt download Word 2007 files properlyHere’s a quick excerptAfter some investigation it turned out that the files causing a problem were the Word 2007 files. I couldn‚Äôt understand what the problem was until I stepped outside of my nice warm Firefox environment and fired up Internet Explorer 6. … [...]
[...] Mr-F wrote an interesting post today on Internet Explorer doesnâÄôt download Word 2007 files properlyHere’s a quick excerptI couldn‚Äôt understand what the problem was until I stepped outside of my nice warm Firefox environment and fired up Internet Explorer 6. Apparently when you try to download a Word 2007 file using IE6 it detects the file as a zip file. … [...]
[...] Mr-F wrote an interesting post today on Internet Explorer doesnâÄôt download Word 2007 files properlyHere’s a quick excerptI couldn‚Äôt understand what the problem was until I stepped outside of my nice warm Firefox environment and fired up Internet Explorer 6. Apparently when you try to download a Word 2007 file using IE6 it detects the file as a zip file. … [...]