Q:
Searching through the newsgroups, I found some discussion between you and others about trying to get Netscape to launch excel. It seems that I have the same problem. My UNIX host has a spreadsheet type xls and my PC running Netscape can't figure out how to launch Excel on the file. I've done the applications configuration per the Netscape Knowledgebase advice, and no luck. > Did you ever figure out the root cause of this problem?
A:
Yes I did! (After over a month of pulling out my hair.)
It turned out not to be a problem at the client side but with the MIME types defined by the Web server. In my company's case we run Apache under Linux. Here's a copy of the appropriate entry in the "mime.types" file:
application/vnd.ms-excel xls xlt xlm xld xla xlc xlw xll xlb
I had to add this line in manually because it wasn't part of the default Apache install. (I have no idea why, and maybe the most recent versions do include it.) As soon as I restarted the Apache daemon Netscape launched Excel just like it should.
(After figuring this out I also added several more application types that were missing - mostly Office products.)
Hopefully you can now sleep at night.
Netscape will not launch Excel for .xls files.
Moderator: jasonb