CIRT, University of North Florida

How can I make Word and other Microsoft Office Documents open in the program that created them instead of the Blackboard web page?

This issue specifically affects those using Internet Explorer. By default, IE opens MS Office files (Word, Excel and PowerPoint) within the browser page.

The quick solution is to right-click the link to the document, then from the popup menu click “Save As…”, save the document to your computer, then open it from where you saved it.

If, instead, you want to change the behavior of IE to automatically open the document in the creating program rather than IE, use the following procedure (from the Microsoft Knowledgebase article 254918):

Turn Off the "Browse in Same Window" Option (Preferred Method)
1. Double-click My Computer.
2. On the Tools menu, click Folder Options.
3. On the File Types tab, in the Registered file types box, click to select the file type that you want to change. For example, click to select Microsoft Word Document.
4. Click Advanced.
5. In the Edit File Type dialog box, uncheck the Browse in same window check box, and then click OK.
6. Click Close to close the Folder Options dialog box.