Question

I have an Excel Add-In file I’m publishing on an intranet (plain ol’ HTTP download, not an attachment in Sharepoint, etc.).

With IE 7, the user click the link and selects “Save”, only to have the file renamed from “myaddin.xla” to “myaddin.xls”. Firefox and Chrome work fine.

Since they are trying to overwrite an existing file in the Library folder and these are not sophisticated users, this issue is complicating my life.

Is there anything I can do on the server (MIME type change, etc.) to force IE7 to leave the extension as-is?

Answer 1

Have you had a look at this Microsoft KB article? Apparently, xla files are really xls files with no worksheets, and therefore have the same MIME type. You might try specifying an alternative MIME type to fool IE7 into leaving the extension alone.