Excel 2016 loads webpage instead of document hosted in SharePoint

Question

Situation : We have several documents hosted on SharePoint 2010, which is on another domain. Most of the documents open fine, except xlsx, and only with Excel 2016.

When clicking on the document, Excel 2016 shows up, and we don't see the expected contents of the xlsx file, we see the main login page of the website where the documents are hosted inside the sheet. What can also happen, is to have a blank worksheet. We don't even see the cells.

The problem doesn't appear with Office 2013.

Sounds like some authentication issue, but I don't get it. Did anybody encounter such an issue ?

Answer 1

I fixed the issue by going into the registry here : HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\16.0\Common\Identity

I then added a DWord Key named "EnableADAL" (please remove quotation marks) I gave it the 0 value.

Reboot and enjoy.

I understood in my researches that Office 2016 and 2013 do not connect the same way to older systems such as SharePoint 2010 by using a new authentication method called "Modern AuthenticatioN".

EnableADAL allows to enable/disable it. And I disabled it in order to open my sharepoint-hosted files, and it works like a charm.