Ramon Ecung's Blog

I recently had an issue where a Word 2007 document (.docx) was on a shared server but users were unable to download it correctly. I tested it in Chrome and Firefox (yeah, you can tell I’m a computer guy) with no problem. The next day other users were complaining of the same issue, so I fired up Internet Explorer, tried to download the form and it was popping up as a .zip.

After some research, it appears Internet Explorer tries to determine the file type from the MIME type the server responds with. (I actually prefer it this way as opposed to looking at the file extension, but that’s another matter.) I can only assume that there was no associated MIME type in Apache for the file so good old IE figure’s it’s a zip file due either to the server using compressed HTTP or the fact that the open xml documents are compressed.

Either way, adding a .htaccess file with the correct MIME types solved my problem. Here’s what I added below:

AddType  application/vnd.openxmlformats  .docx .pptx .xlsx .xltx . xltm .dotx .potx .ppsx

Just throw that in a file called htaccess.txt (assuming you’re in Windows), upload it to your server, and rename it to “.htaccess”. You should instantly be able to download the file.

EDIT: Just as a side note, I thought it was funny when I called the hosting company to let them know of their oversight, the tech on the other end of the line told me it wasn’t an error, tried to tell me that Chrome used the IE rendering engine, and that Opera was actually a new web browser. Very amusing.