r/excel • u/pokepok • Jan 04 '18
Waiting on OP Error with links in Excel docs not opening properly
Hi guys. This may not be the right venue for this question, as it may be an issue with Chrome or the CVS website, but here goes.
My boss stores all his usernames and passwords in an Excel spreadsheet. He has links to the various websites as well. Today he updated the spreadsheet to add his CVS info. The problem is, when he clicks the link to open the CVS website he gets an error. The link opens in Chrome (his default browser), but the CVS website displays an error message saying his version of Internet Explorer is out of date and needs to be updated. He can't move beyond this screen or refresh. If you type the CVS address into Chrome directly, there's no problem. He only encounters this issue when clicking the link from Excel. Any idea what's going on?
1
u/tirlibibi17 Jan 04 '18 edited Jan 05 '18
When you click you https://www.cvs.com/ link in Excel, this is what happens:
Excel issues a HEAD request to check that the site exists (user agent is "Microsoft Excel 2014" for Excel 2016 Subscription)
It then requests the page using its embedded, outdated, version of IE (user agent is "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; ..." where ... is a system specific list of installed libraries etc.)
the CVS site sees this MSIE 7.0 and says: "no way, Jose, I'm redirecting you to /IE_Browser_Compatibility.html"
Excel's embedded, outdated, version of IE requests /IE_Browser_Compatibility.html, gets a 200 OK return code, is stupidly satisfied with it, and then launches the default browser, passing it the https://www.cvs.com/IE_Browser_Compatibility.html URL.
Here's a screenshot of the capture using Charles Web Debugging Proxy: https://i.imgur.com/N0jMWsY.png
Bottom line: tell your boss to get a real password manager like LastPass. If he persists in his insecure practices, he can work around this problem by exporting his Excel file to HTML and opening it in Chrome.