I have a SharePoint site that I've moved into SP Online and have a question about getting documents to open either in the client version of office or the online version, but not both.
I've noticed that if the document is housed in a document library, opening it, does so in office online. I've also noticed that if the document is linked via a hyperlink in an HTML forms web part, opening it, does so in the client version of office. How do I force consistency?
Well… doing some research I found a site collection feature: “Open Documents in Client Applications by Default“. I turned this on to no avail. I then read online that this setting only affects new document libraries. Existing ones need to have the setting changed in the library itself. Fortunately, the libraries are set to “Use the server default (Open in the browser)”.
I tried setting a document library to “Open in Client Application” and documents still did not open in client. Further testing showed me that this setting only affects how IE opens documents. Firefox and chrome open documents in office online. I do not have access to edge but think that it would behave as IE does. I’m thinking that somehow Microsoft has not made this feature browser independent as is the case with some other features. That being said, how do I fix this so that users of the site are not having confused when trying to open documents. I’d like all documents to open in the client application as was the case with SP 2010.