Default Way of Opening Excel from Web

If you upload excel 2010 workbooks into Pwa, say the Shared Documents folder, select the name of the document to open, it defaults to opening it in Excel web viewer. From here you can open the workbook in excel for further editing and viewing. Fine.

So now you would like to link to these documents by creating a new link on the Quick Launch that will take you to the excel web view of the workbook. You do this by copying the shortcut (right click - copy shortcut) and pasting it as a new link on the quick launch.

But what if you don't want it to go to the excel web viewer and you just want the link to automatically open the workbook in excel? This is common due to limitations of the excel viewer around macros and protected sheets etc.

It is the difference in the link you use.

The following link ( copied shortcut) will open the workbook in excel viewer by default:

Http://epm/Pwa/layouts/xlviewer.aspx?id=/Pwa/shared%20documents/document1.xlsm&source=http%3a%2f%2fepm%2fpwa%2fshared%20documents%2fforms%2fallitems%2easpx&defaultitemopen=1 

However if you enter a simpler version of the link, it will open the workbook in excel by default:

Http://epm/Pwa/shared documents/document1.xlsm

So for workbooks that can display and refresh data successfully via the web viewer, just copy the shortcut to the document and paste as a link wherever you like. However if you have a more complex workbook with protected sheets, macros or to be saved locally by the user quickly, use the simpler version of the link above.