Ability to control how an excel file reacts in netscape when clicked..

[Guest_imported]

Hi. My name is John Kosmides and i have a question that i hope you can answer. I work for Ohio University in the Technical services department of the library. Today, we were faced with a problem in the government documents area. They have a series of Excel files that are downloadable from some of OU's pages for research. Since we do not allow access to the hard drive on our public machines, (though the cache and temp dir's are writeable) they cannot view these documents, since the policy is to use netscape on public machines. In internet explorer, when you click on a hyperlinked excel file, it opens up, right up in the browser window. however in netscape, the ONLY option is to save it to disk. this presents a problem as you can see.

our task at hand today was to integrate the MS Excel viewer into netscape, which was supposed to make the excel file appear in the window. though it gave us the same save-as dialouge. we would allow access to a download directory, though most of our students are not as computer savvy as we would like, and do not understand how to do some simple things. also, we do not have time to have our librarians teach every student how to open a file with the excel viewer.

so this is our problem. we know that we can use active-x to create a plugin that downloads the excel file (in the background), then opens it up in in the viewer.

can you be of any assistance?
Thanks for your time.

John Kosmides
Technical Services