Excel downloads hyperlink rather than open it

[Hpjberesford]

I have a shared excel workbook within my team and within the workbook are embedded hyperlinks to other shared excel workbooks. For all of the team apart from one, the hyperlink opens the excel workbook, but for one colleague the hyperlink downloads. I have scoured her settings but can't see anything to solve this (I've already ensured open supported hyperlinks to office files in office desktop apps is ticked) and searched online (including on this forum). Your help is much appreciated

TIA
Hayden

 

[6StringJazzer]

Give an example of a hyperlink you are using. (SharePoint site? OneDrive? Other cloud service? Web site? Network file server?)
What version of Excel is opening the file, and what version of Excel is downloading it?

 

[Hpjberesford]

We are all using excel 365. The link is pointing to an internal sharepoint site https://companycollaboration.sharepoint.com/sites/file path/document.xlsx

Having seen my colleague click the link it looks like it is being downloaded in chrome or certainly the chrome browser is open and it appears in the download icon in the chrome toolbar. So I have had a look at chrome settings but can't see anyting either.

I hope that's all the info you need and I haven't confused things further

Hayden

 

[6StringJazzer]

I don't know how Chrome is coming into play. Are you using Excel 365 on the desktop version, or the online version?

There are Chrome settings to open a file directly but it still downloads it and opens the local copy. That sounds like it's not going to help you.

 

[6StringJazzer]

I have looked at a lot of Google hits for this problem and I see no consistent solution, in fact few solutions at all.

Here is one person who found that an anti-malware program was causing this. The key is to find out what about this one person's environment is different than everybody else's, and it may not be directly related to Excel.

I had a colleague with the exact same problem today. It had started suddenly last night. What worked for us was to uninstall HP Wolf Security and the accompanying HP Security Update Service.

 

[Hpjberesford]

We tend to use a mix of online and desktop. However my colleague has been in the desktop version of the excel file when clicking the hyperlink. I think for me it doesn't matter whether I am in excel online or excel desktop version the hyperlinks till works for me.
My only suspicion is that because the hyperlink starts with https my colleagues computer tries to open this in the browser and whereas other computers then open the excel file in online or desktop, her computer downloads the file to her computer

 

[6StringJazzer]

Your suspicion makes sense if we just look at the behavior but I still don't know why it would work differently on just this one machine. I wonder if it is some kind of Registry setting.