Office protocol handler works with Office 2019, but not with Office 2016

Question

On an Intranet web page, I have a link to an Excel document that resides on a network drive, like so:

ms-excel:ofv|u|file:///N:/folder/file.xlsx

This is an office protocol handler described here.

On computers with Office 2019 installed, the Excel document opens with the registered application (Excel) without problems; on computers with Office 2016 I get the following error:

The action couldn't be performed because Office doesn't recognize the command it was given.

I compared the registry keys at \HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\ms-excel\ and they are basically the same (of course the path to protocolhandler.exe is different).

When I execute protocolhandler.exe on the command line on the computers with Office 2016, I always get the above error regardless of how I try to launch an Excel or Word document (e.g. ms-excel:ofv|u|file:///... or ms-word:ofv|u|http://...)

Versions of Office:

Office Professional Plus 2019 Version 1808 (Build 10382.20010 click-and-run) 64-bit

Office Professional Plus 2016 Version 16.0.5266.1000 MSO 64-bit

Is there any way to make the protocol handler work with Office 2016?

Answer 1

As you can imagine, that exe handles all the different protocols integrated into MS products. Because of this, every variation of office (or windows) need to have their very own version of this file, in order to operate correctly. Which is also why this file comes deeply embedded within the Office product folder.