Opening PDFs in SharePoint 2010
Chris McKinley | May 5, 2010If you have your nice SP2010 setup you may notice that when you go to open a PDF file it prompts you to save it rather than opening.
This is really annoying and would send everyone here at the school completely bananas! Not to mention the fact that we try to get everything on SharePoint only to force people to save it to their own area!
Never fear there is a solution. It’s in central admin.
Go there and click ‘Manage Web Applications’
Click on the web app you want to change, and go to ‘General Settings’
Scroll down the list until you reach ‘Browser File Handling’
Change the radio box from Strict to Permissive.
Click ok.
Go back to your PDF document and click on it – and it will open up without forcing you to save it somewhere first.
You may have noticed in the first screen shot there was no PDF icon. Well, follow this guide to right that wrong!
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I’ve tried this solution, but nothing changes. When I try to open the PDF I still get the dialog to save the file. Opening in the browser doens’t work.
Additionally I’ve installed the PDF iFilter…
Do you have any idea on what the problem could be. Opening the PDF in FireFox or Safari works as expected…
Thank yo ufor the feedback.
Thanks for the comment.
I can only think that it may be the default programme settings on the local computer. Is the behaviour consistent across machines in your organisation? Also what version of IE, windows and Office are installed on the local machine?
Same problem here, this solution does’nt work for me. I have IE8, FireFox 3.0, winxp sp2, and office 2007 locally. It occurs on other machines as wello
We too have gone through this and what we’ve noticed is that the only doc library affected by the “strict to permissive” change, when changing to permissive, is the home page library. All of the sub site and tertiary site librarys will prompt for read only/edit, but then prompt for a file save regardless of which is chosen. This only seems to happen in IE 8 – FireFox works perfectly.
Any thoughts on this would be appreciated, and thank you for writing the article.
I have the same problem. What I notice is the following:
-> if I deploy a new site from a saved templates, all document libraries from this new site has the PDF problem (only SAVE AS possible)
-> If I remove one document library from the new site and recreate the document library, the PDF problem is solved
It looks like it has something to do with deploying a new site from a template.
Has anybody any idea?
Best regards,
Ronald van Vugt
I just want to say THANK YOU for making my life easier..
When I did a search on this topic, I was lucky enough to find this one first. Nothing is EVER that easy and your directions were perfect!!
Kimberly
SP 2010 Newbie
Setting the web app browser file handling setting to permissive did fix the same issue for me. Thanks !
Hi,
I am experiencing the same issue as detailed by Ronald va Vugt:
I have sites created from site templates, and .msg and .pdf files are being prompted to save, not open or save, despite having the web apllication Brwoser File Handling set to Permissive. However, if i creaate a new document library in those sites, they respect the browser file handling setting of the web appliation.
Can anyone suggest a solution to this so that all my existing site’s document libraries allow permissve file handling (i.e. allow open)?
Thank you
Same Problem as Ronald van Vugt (Libraries crated from Site Template). Has anyone found a solution other then recreating the library?
Thank you
It worked..Opens the pdf in the brower
Thanks
Sethu
THANKS! that worked. WTH Microsoft? As if people dont upload and view .pdf’s to document libraries to view?
I found this solution while trying to resolve another issue though. I cannot get my PDF icons to display. I have gone to the 14 hive and added the icon to images and edited the icon .xml file. No typo’s or anything, still wont display the pdf icon and in the X / image properties, it does now know what file type it is anymore (yet opens in proper PDF app when clicked). Therefore cannot locate its icon.
Hello,
I still was unable to solve my problem (see my comment on june 21). Has someone already found a solution?
Best regards,
Ronald van Vugt
Having the same issue as well. I also tried going onto the doc lib > Settings > Advanced settings > Opening Documents in Browser > Open in Client Application
Still getting prompted to save. This is a huge issue for current & potential clients!
Do you still get prompted after following all the instructions?
The answer for this is here…sub sites that previously exist before doing this require you to set them explicitly using powershell:
http://nerdtastictips.blogspot.com/2010/08/sp2010-forces-users-to-save-pdfs.html
It worked. Thank you very much for your infomation !!
Shinya-K