Viewing Word Docs READ ONLY

Question

I have a report reading records out of a DMS system and I thought it would be nice to have a link to the documents that it is listing so that the users could view the actual documents. However when it displays a Word doc it allows you to make changes and then save them, which rather undermines the DMS system. I don't think there is a parameter (/r) in Word that does this so do any of you clever people out there have a solution please?

Answer 1

Here is a link to the command line switches in Word 2007. There does not appear to be such an option as you describe. The /r switch re-registers Word in the registry and closes. Probably the best way to do this is download the Word Viewer and use it to open the document rather than Word itself.

Answer 2

Or export to PDF?

Answer 3

If you have the option to write a small web component, write a component that takes an ID and streams out the document, then link to that service from the report. The web server will make a local copy of the document for reading.

Of course, then users will be frustrated that their changes are going into a black hole, but it sounds like that may be a better problem to have.

There's a better answer for those using Sharepoint

Answer 4

OK thanks for your suggestions but I am not exporting I am just getting a URL to the file to view from the report so I slapped that into the Navigation properties and was chuffed that MSGs, TIF's, PDF's worked fine but DOCs are amendable. I was hoping for a simple solution but I think I may have to dive out to VB and build a custom viewer and guarantee read only access.

If any of you have any articles on this to point me at that would be much appreciated thanks again.