Join the AMA (Ask Me Anything) with the Firefox leadership team to celebrate Firefox 20th anniversary and discuss Firefox’s future on Mozilla Connect. Mark your calendar on Thursday, November 14, 18:00 - 20:00 UTC!

This site will have limited functionality while we undergo maintenance to improve your experience. If an article doesn't solve your issue and you want to ask a question, we have our support community waiting to help you at @FirefoxSupport on Twitter and/r/firefox on Reddit.

Search Support

Avoid support scams. We will never ask you to call or text a phone number or share personal information. Please report suspicious activity using the “Report Abuse” option.

Learn More

IE lets me, Edit with Microsot Office. I cant do this with Firefox??

more options

Using IE version 8 and Microsoft Office 2003. Using IE, after a Web Page with TEXT ONLY, is displayed, i can go to, FILE-a menu opens. One of the options that can be chosen is: EDIT WITH MICROSOFT OFFICE. This option will transfer the Text from the web page to Microsoft Office. In my case it goes to WORD.

I would like to do this with Firefox and not go back and load IE.

Using IE version 8 and Microsoft Office 2003. Using IE, after a Web Page with TEXT ONLY, is displayed, i can go to, FILE-a menu opens. One of the options that can be chosen is: EDIT WITH MICROSOFT OFFICE. This option will transfer the Text from the web page to Microsoft Office. In my case it goes to WORD. I would like to do this with Firefox and not go back and load IE.

All Replies (1)

more options

You've probably used "View Source" in Firefox. You can have Microsoft Word be your application to view source. This is a read-only copy that you would have to save into a new location; you can't actually edit the live web site using Word through Firefox.

There might be an add-on to make this easier, but if not, here's what you need to do.

First, you need to get the path to Microsoft Word 2003. On XP, this probably is the following:

C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE11\WINWORD.EXE

You might want to select that and copy it to the clipboard.

Second, you need to update two settings in Firefox.

(1) In a new tab, type or paste about:config in the address bar and press Enter. Click the button promising to be careful.

(2) In the filter box, type or paste view_source and pause while the list is filtered

(3) Double-click view_source.editor.path and paste the path to Word.

(4) Double-click view_source.editor.external to toggle it to true (it should turn bold).

Then return to a regular web page and try View Source. Does it work?

One issue you may run into is that by default, Word will render the HTML source back into a web page. To defeat that, you may need to set this option in Word:

Tools > Options > General tab > check Confirm conversion at open

Then choose Plain Text when prompted.

Hope this helps.

Modified by jscher2000 - Support Volunteer