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I am working on a SharePoint 2013 solution on premise with office web apps on premise.

When users are on a mobile device and try to open a pdf document from search they are greeted with the following message: "Viewing of .pdf files has been disabled in Microsoft Word Mobile viewer".

I have tried both enable and disable: New-SPWOPIBinding –ServerName "Server.corp.Contoso.com" -Action "MobileView" –Application "WordPDF" -AllowHTTP from this article https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/office/en-US/ebb2cc99-2cdf-44a9-964a-e922b1ae11e8/cannot-open-pdf-on-mobile-device?forum=sharepointgeneral. This does nothing.

I found this https://support.microsoft.com/en-au/kb/2912639 which says “This problem occurs because PDF viewing on mobile browsers is not supported in Office Web Apps or Office Online Server.”

If this is true, do anybody have some workaround solutions or alternatives?

The use case is technicians driving around doing jobs need to view PDFs on tablets and phones but not download them on the device.

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    I am currently working on the same issue. I did not find any solution yet. My current idea is to connect a OfficeOnline Server (2016!) to SharePoint 2013 instead of OfficeWebApps2013. Maybe OfficeOnline Server supports PDFs on mobile devices. I will test this today and keep you up to date.
    – MHeld
    Commented Aug 18, 2016 at 7:37
  • Still doesn't work with OfficeOnlineServer patched to latest CU (July '16). "Viewing of .pdf files has been disabled in Microsoft Word Mobile Viewer. Please get in touch with your helpdesk".
    – MHeld
    Commented Aug 24, 2016 at 7:10
  • I heard that Microsoft will fix this issue in a CU later this year. Fingers crossed.
    – Karl
    Commented Aug 30, 2016 at 12:36
  • Can the PDF's be embedded into the list items form?
    – Luke Walker
    Commented Aug 22, 2017 at 13:42

1 Answer 1

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The default OWA action is to open PDF files in WordPDF Application. To overcome this behavior, we can remove the WordPDF binding from OWA and let it open by Ifilter as default. Run the following command in SharePoint Application server where you configured OWA WOPI Binding. This command will remove the WordPDF Application Binding from your SharePoint farm. This won’t harm any other applications such as Word, Excel or PPTX.

Get-SPWOPIBinding -Action "view" -Application "WordPDF" | Remove-SPWOPIBinding

Removing the Binding for the WordPDF application will allow all the mobile devices to open PDF files from the browser normally without utilizing OWA WORD Application.

Reference: https://manojviduranga.wordpress.com/2016/04/13/unable-to-open-pdf-files-stored-in-sharepoint-using-mobile-browsers/

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    Afraid it doesn't help very much because, while this may theoretically answer the question, we prefer inclusion of the essential parts of the answer here, and to provide the link for reference. See How do I write a good answer for general guidelines.
    – Mohamed El-Qassas MVP ♦
    Commented Aug 29, 2017 at 23:02

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