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Linking to MS Office File in Emacs Org Mode

July 18, 2012 by 3 Comments

My daily workflow includes emacs org mode files for each project I’m working on. I often link to files, programs, etc. from these org mode files. I tried linking to a MS Excel spreadsheet using my usual

file:/path/to/file.xlsx

link. However, since the xlsx file is really a zip file, emacs opened a dired buffer revealing the contents, rather than opening it in Excel.

After a bit of googling, I found a message from the org mode mailing list about linking to Excel and Word documents from org mode and discovered the file+sys link type. This, per the org mode External Links manual, will “open via OS, like double-click”, which is exactly what I want. Good reminder for myself: when all else fails, RTFM.

Filed Under: Tech Tagged With: emacs, msoffice, orgmode

Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Joao Brito says

    December 27, 2013 at 7:23 am

    tks. I’d never noticed file+sys type of link, although I’ve already lost some precious hours trying to handle this kind of situation.

    Reply
  2. eliaso says

    April 30, 2014 at 2:22 am

    thanks, TFM is too big

    Reply
  3. Ricardo Orbegozo says

    August 23, 2019 at 5:10 am

    Your postr is still valid, and, as Joao, I lost precious time setting org-file-apps to open xlsx files in excel and now I find your solution more accurate, thank you for sharing

    Reply

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