Unable to see Excel as an option to download data

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Guest

I am trying to dowload data from the website of a company I work with.

I am on Windows XP, I have IE 6.0.2900.2180 SP2, and Excel 2003 SP.

The page where I am trying to get the report from offers data types in a
dropdown menu. Excel does not even APPEAR for me as an option on that page,
just HTML and CSV. This issue has been tested across a number of machines at
my company and at the vendor, and it appears to be a bug within IE6 and
handling Excel files.

Is there a patch out there that I can download to fix this? All of the
research that I have done so far doesn't seem to indicate that Microsoft has
fixed this yet.

Thanks for your help.
 
I tried installing IE 7 Beta today, and it failed to solve my problem.

Here are some additional notes from our vendor that might help you to advise
me:

When you view any URL (in particular the reporting in this case) IE will
send what is called an HTTP_Accept request to the server that is hosting the
page. Now, what we are seeing is two things in particular: some people can
view get all the options from the drop-down list and some cannot. What is
going on is that in the browsers that are not having problems, the request
looks like this: HTTP_Accept = application/vnd.ms-excel. In the browsers
that are having problems, the request from IE looks like this: HTTP_Accept =
*/*

As you can see from above, the good requests are coming from IE accept
requests that are specifically telling the server it can accept Excel files.
The ones with the problem are not telling the server what it can accept. The
*/* character is basically saying that the browser will accept whatever is
thrown at it and the browser will make a decision on what to use based on the
browser’s best choice.

So at this point you may be logically thinking, well this doesn’t explain
why the selection is not in the drop-down, and you would be right. We have
code on in or pages which will selectively display options depending on what
it receives from the HTTP_Accept request. In this case, if the site does not
specifically see HTTP_Accept = application/vnd.ms-excel, it sees that the
browser does not have access to Excel so it will not even show the selection.

Logically, you are thinking well can’t we just take this logic out so that
the selection will be there no matter what? Well we did attempt to do that,
and we found out that doing this the browser takes over and makes an
executive decision on it’s own on what to use. Instead of Excel, it uses the
HTML version when Excel is selected from the drop-down list.

So, as you can see at this point the problem is not that our site is working
incorrectly; rather there is a bug in IE 6 that is not properly sending the
correct information in the HTTP_Accept request.
 
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