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Opening Word Docs inside Internet Explorer in Vista?


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Ah progress - you gotta love it. Fewer choices, less control the dumbing down of the masses.

I'm checking out some old code that I've used to load Word documents for editing into a Web Browser control. It appears that under Vista this doesn't work any longer as a Word document now refuses to load into the Web browser control. I'm not sure if the issue is one of security in Windows or whether Word has simply lost the ability to act as an ActiveDocument container. I can't get it to work either way in a Web Browser control or for external documents. Other documents like PDF loading into FoxIt seem to work fine displaying inside the browser, so I suspect this is a Word issue.

Anyway, I tried looking around for File Options which used to be found in the Explorer menu's Tools | Options | File Types tab. That tab no longer exists and the associations have moved to the Default Programs Control Panel Window | Associate a File with a Program. Unfortunately you can only associate - the options of the old dialogs have disappeared.

So does anybody know if it's still possible to load Word documents in IE? I have a couple of document management apps that more or less relied on this mechanism for viewing content. While the app still works the external document really screws with the way the app flows.

Anybody know?

Posted in Office  Vista  

The Voices of Reason


 

Daniel BrĂ¼nteson
September 04, 2007

# re: Opening Word Docs inside Internet Explorer in Vista?


Rick Strahl
September 04, 2007

# re: Opening Word Docs inside Internet Explorer in Vista?

Thanks Daniel. Looks like the link to the KB Article did the trick. I did have to set flags in a bunch of different of the Word settings.

Daniel BrĂ¼nteson
September 04, 2007

# re: Opening Word Docs inside Internet Explorer in Vista?

Yes, I had to set it on a bunch of file myself as well. I am a bit puzzled why MS did this so hard in Vista though.

cj from australia
April 15, 2008

# re: Opening Word Docs inside Internet Explorer in Vista?

Thank you guys. Your link led me to the solution for this annoying problem. After few days of hard work I am glad now this is over. Great work guys. Thank you once again.

George Birbilis
September 23, 2010

# re: Opening Word Docs inside Internet Explorer in Vista?

Thanks Daniel,
the KB article at http://support.microsoft.com/?id=927009 seems to have a Microsoft FixIt button that should do the trick for end-users who don't want to play with the registry (also has nice .reg file text there for one to include [for registry merging] at their installer)

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