Creating a shareable document link that forces a document to open in Office for desktop, not Online?

[Toby McDaid]

SharePoint Online has a feature you can enable where a document will open on the user's client when they select it from a document library, as opposed to Office Online.

The problem is that if you use SharePoint's 'copy URL' option to share a document it automatically defaults to a URL that opens the document inside the browser, not the user's client.

Is there any way I can achieve this? 

[#2]

So, this is kind of tricky. It depends. You can force a download by putting &download=1 at the end of the URL, but that will only open their own copy. If you want to have single source of truth and them edit a shared location with their desktop client then you'll have to get the original URL. Basically what I do is navigate to the folder where the file is. Copy the URL from the browser url bar, then add in the name of the file at the end. Need to add %20 for spaces, but this will get a direct link to the file which should respect the document library setting.

[#3]

Hi there

Yep this is one of our huge frustrations. The only way we’ve figured out is by these by above as mentioned and also two somewhat simpler methods:

1) Have the document open in the office application > File > then click under the Filename which is the location where the file is stored in SharePoint (see image attached) then click copy link to clipboard, paste the URL in an email and delete the last few characters “?web=1”

Anyone who clicks that link will open the document up in the respective office application if it is installed on the machine.

2) If you are using the classic view of the document library: Usinf IE11 browser highlight the name of the document and copy, paste in an email. This pastes the name of the document with the URL behind it which opens the file in the Office application.
(I’ve noticed this doesn’t work in Edge or in the modern library experience)

Hope this helps!

Cheers
Jess