Link to Local Network file - alternate method for "Open Link in Local Context"?

[Tim Knight]

Hello,

I have finally linked a file on my company network and am able to open the file in Excel but the process of having to:

Right click on the link,

Select "Open Link in Local Context",

In "New Window",

Is a process I would have to explain on every page I have a link because my end users will not know this is how to open a linked file through the browser. I have to many to teach and most would not get it no matter how many times I explained it.

Is there a way to create a macro or alternate method of launching the link with one left hand click (a button)?

This is the text that worked for me in FireFox 22.0 but not Windows Explorer 7.0:

In Confluence Insert Link and...

[myfile.xls|file:///Y:/QA/shared/myfile.xls]

where myfile = the name of my excel file

Y = my mapped network drive

I have no idea what the symbol is after the [myfile.xls?...] and for some reason a new firefox window opens along with Excel.

I installed the addon LocalLink 0.5 but have no idea if that helped me or if it took me 20 forums to discover the correct syntax.

Thanks for any help,

Tim

[MB]

I'm not sure why do you use mapped network drive letter, because it works on your computer (where you created that mapping) but it will not work on other people's computers, since they didn't create that same mapping. If you really want people to access that file over network share, you need to make sure that all of your users will have the access to that network share, on which you put your shared file. Also, you can't reference the file using mapped drive letter (Y:) but rather a full machine name + path to the file. For example: "file:///our-network-file-server/public/shared/myfile.xls"

But, if you are on windows, most probably you have set up a Samba sharing and users with Windows installed will probably have no problem accessing it, but people on Linux will most probably have to do some additional steps in order to get it all working. The workaround might be to use the ip address instead of a host name (something like "1.2.3.4" instead of "our-network-file-server"), but then you will have a problem if that ip is changed over time...

You could resolve these issues using a different approach, for example, running a web server on that machine, where your file is located (or a ftp server). If your machine is running Windows, there is a small web server which might help (just put the exe file in a folder that you want other people to be able to access and start it). You would access your file using "http://computer-name-or-ip-address:8080/myfile.xls" (in your case "http://our-network-file-server:8080/myfile.xls"). If you decide to go this way, feel free to ask more questions if you can't get it up and running in 1 minute.

Another solution is to run a full featured web/ftp server, like Apache web server or FileZilla FTP server.