Microsoft Office Files & Desktop Apps
A common request when working with Microsoft Office files (Word documents, Excel workbooks, PowerPoint presentations and so on) is whether the Quicklink to the document can open directly in the respective Microsoft Office desktop application (e.g. Microsoft Word for Word documents, etc.), specifically where these files are stored in SharePoint Online document libraries. The steps below describe how to achieve this.
Please note, the format of these things has changed completely several times over the years with SharePoint Online, and each time requires a different way to handle the scenario. This guide provides a solution according to the most recent version of SharePoint Online but is subject to change as Microsoft changes these paths.
Getting the Correct Document Link
The first step in getting this working is using the link to the document in the correct format. These days, when you try to get a link to a SharePoint Online document, such as by using the Copy Link option inside Microsoft Teams, you'll end up with a link like this: https://[myorganizaion].sharepoint.com/:x:/s/thesite/thelibrary/EY_somelongnumber?e=L8pV4i. However, to get a link that the Microsoft Office desktop applications can open directly, you need the address to be more traditional, something like: https://[myorganizaion].sharepoint.com/sites/thesite/thelibrary/My%20-File.xlsx?web=1. In fact, if you note the ?web=1 on the end - that should also not be there. Fortunately, there are two easy alternatives to get the this clean style of link, as described below.
Getting the Document Link in the Office Client
To access the clean web path for an Office document from within the relevant Microsoft Office application, first go to the File menu on the top left, as shown below.
Next, under the Info section on the left menu, select the Copy path button. This will give you the correct format for web link to use, but note that it will contain ?web=1 on the end, which needs to be removed when you paste it in later.
Getting the Document Link in the SharePoint Online
To get the clean web path for an Office document from within SharePoint Online, open the information panel for the document in the right menu (by clicking the ⓘ symbol on the menu on the top right, as shown in the screenshot below). Within this panel, scroll right to the bottom and click the copy icon next to the Path property, as shown in the screenshot below.
Finalizing the Quicklink Web Address
We now have a clean web link to the file, using one of the methods above, but we still need one last step to tell Windows to open the link directly in the desktop app. We do this by adding a special opening instruction at the front of the url, telling Windows which application to open, similar to this: ms-word:ofe|u|https://[myorganizaion].sharepoint.com/sites/thesite/thelibrary/My%20-File.xlsx, where ms-word is for opening Microsoft Word, ms-excel is for opening Microsoft Excel, and so on. The full list can be found here but note that it's also possible to control the access mode (read only vs read/write) using this format, as well as some other commands. See more here in the same document.
That's it - using the steps above should give you a link for Quicklinks (or anywhere else) that should open the Office Desktop application directly for the relevant file, intead of opening a web version.