How can you make sure that a document that is on my website actually opens immediately when someone clicks on it (instead of downloading it)? Or is it silly to want that?
Not âsillyâ, at most a little naive. 
Which âdocumentsâ are you talking about and which app on the computer of the downloading user should open which document? A jpg-file could be opened by a lot of apps (Preview, Photoshop etc.) and also a Word-document could be opened by several apps (Pages, MS Word, OpenOffice etc.). Also a PDF-file could be opened by Preview, Adobe Reader, Adobe Acrobat or PDF Expert etc. I think that doesnât make sense, so you should bury this ideaâŚ
@rosek it all starts with what the âdocumentâ type is that you want displayed?
The best way to insure that something opens âimmediatelyâ is to keep the size of the file itself small and of course, make sure the page that contains it also loads quickly.
Hello Rose, what kind of document (or ist it text, images or both) are you talking about? If you can convert the document into a pdf-file it can be see in the browser and even easily downloaded and seen on nearly any device.
Thank you. The documents are .doc and .xlx, so that should be easy. Iâll try that thank you.
Rose
Dear Chuck
The documents are excel and word files. And certainly not big. So that is not the problem. Sb told me pdfâs open immediately, but is that true? Or does it have sth to do with browser settings when a file doesnât open immediately?
Maybe because of security settings in the browser?
Rose
Thnks! The documents are doc-files and xls-files, so relatively simple.
Could it be caused by browser security settings that a file doesnât open. That would be my guess, after some more thinking.
Rose
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Hi @rosek,
On Windows, visitors canât open Word and Excel files automatically from a browser because of Windowsâ built-in security measures (Word and Excel files can be used to spread viruses, is why).
Iâm afraid youâll have to get used to visitors having to download those file types first.
Cheers,
Erwin
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Although doc- and xls-files may look simple âfrom the outsideâ they arenât simple at all when looking at the internal file structure. Also such files could contain malware, so it could be a security risk to directly open them. To my knowledge thereâs no easy solution to open these file formats directly inside the browser.
For PDF-files there are stacks available which display them directly on a page or in a lightbox (see link by @ToF ).
Thanks!
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