Tag: Office Web Apps (OWA)

Link to “open in browser” with Office Web Apps

In SharePoint 2013, especially when on Office 365, you probably want to take advantage of Office Web Apps (OWA) to open Office documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc) in the browser.

EDIT: In SharePoint Online the best way to achieve this is by adding ‘web=1’ as a query string parameter to the file URL. E.g. https://tenant.sharepoint.com/Documents/file.docx?web=1

URL to 'Open in brower'
URL to ‘Open in brower’

A common scenario could be an implementation of the “Feedback (SharePoint 2010)” workflow which creates a task with accompanying email for many users. Some of these users may not be able to open Office documents on their client. Unfortunately, the default email content provides a link which only allows the user to download the document (which they are then unable to view) and provides no link back to the document library to find the document in a more manual fashion. In this particular scenario SharePoint Designer (SPD) is a very useful tool to update the email content with a link that allows users to take advantage of OWA. I am not going to go into how to update the workflow using SPD, I will only discuss the link URL format itself.

The URL format you are looking for is: <Site URL>/_layouts/15/WopiFrame.aspx?sourcedoc=<Doc URL>&action=default

Some things of note:

  • If you inspect the href of a document in a library you will notice that the sourcedoc parameter is not a URL but GUID. This GUID is NOT the unique ID of the document. Providing the unique ID of the document instead of the URL will fail (or potentially display another document).
  • You can provide either an absolute URL or a server relative URL for the source doc, and ensure it is encoded.

In case you are using SPD the link address you want is:
[%Workflow Context:Current Site URL%]/_layouts/15/WopiFrame.aspx?sourcedoc=[%Current Item:Encoded Absolute URL%]&action=default
 

EDIT 31/30/2015: I’ve been advised by a colleague that this only works when the Site URL and Doc URL are both relative to the same site. This appears to be true in SharePoint Online, however I am almost certain this was not an issue when I wrote this article (I no longer have access to that environment).

Paul.