Setting mime type for excel document

Question

MS Excel has the following observed MIME types:

• application/vnd.ms-excel (official)
• application/msexcel
• appli

Answer 1

I believe the standard MIME type for Excel files is application/vnd.ms-excel.

Regarding the name of the document, you should set the following header in the response:

header('Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="name_of_excel_file.xls"');

Answer 2

I was setting MIME type from .NET code as below -

File(generatedFileName, "application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet")

My application generates excel using OpenXML SDK. This MIME type worked -

vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet

Answer 3

For anyone who is still stumbling with this after using all of the possible MIME types listed in the question:

I have found that iMacs tend to also throw a MIME type of "text/xls" for XLS Excel files, hope this helps.

Answer 4

You should always use below MIME type if you want to serve excel file in xlsx format

application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet 

Answer 5

For .xls use the following content-type

application/vnd.ms-excel

For Excel 2007 version and above .xlsx files format

application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet

Answer 6

Waking up an old thread here I see, but I felt the urge to add the "new" .xlsx format.

According to http://filext.com/file-extension/XLSX the extension for .xlsx is application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.spreadsheetml.sheet. It might be a good idea to include it when checking for mime types!