Encoding issue when viewing Microsoft Office documents

[vogelizer]

Spent days trying to fix this--I'd really appreciate any suggestions...

Here's what I'm encountering in the documents section:

After clicking "view" icon and downloading a Microsoft Office document,
the downloaded file shows extra ASCII characters (looks like formatting chars are being displayed).

Here's an example of the formatting characters (I'm not sure what encoding it is):
ÐÏࡱá>þÿ 
ƒþÿÿÿcÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿÿ

txt and pdf files display correctly.

I've tried matching related variables in config.php and php.ini with an instance of SugarCRM that encodes Microsoft documents correctly. For example:

config.php
'default_export_charset' => 'ISO-8859-1' | 'UTF-8'
'default_charset' => 'ISO-8859-1' | 'UTF-8'

php.ini:
mbstring.internal_encoding = UTF-8
mbstring.encoding_translation = On | Off


My search on this hasn't turned up any results to SugarCRM issues with MS documents. I'm sure there's something really simple I'm missing.

Thanks.
Pat
version 4.5.0f
Bitrock WAMP installer
Windows Server 2003
IIS 6.0

[andydreisch]

Hi vogelizer, are you using Firefox? My guess is that FF has no idea how to display the content because it is missing a file association.

I'm no expert in this but in FF you can associate a file type with a viewer/program using Tools -> Options, click the Downloads button and then "View and Edit Actions...".

Check this out and let us know.

Andy

[vogelizer]

Hi Andy,

Thanks for your fast response!

I was using IE7, but FireFox 1.5.0.9 does exhibit the same behavior with MS documents. For FireFox, although MS Office documents are not listed in the Download Action list, I do have a Mozilla plug-in installed for handling these (NPOFFICE.DLL).

I can download and open MS documents successfully using another installation of SugarCRM hosted by an external host company. So, I assumed there must be a config issue with our local Sugar installation. I've matched the config.php variables for both setups to no avail.

Do you have any idea what could be wrong with the Sugar config to cause this encoding issue?

Thanks again. I really appreciate your advice.

Pat

Version 4.5.0f
Bitrock WAMP installer
Windows Server 2003
IIS 6.0