One of my many frustrations with SharePoint - is that when you open a file from a document library, SharePoint tries by default to open it (a) in the browser, and (b) when its an Office 365 document, with edit rights.
This behaviour is perhaps fine in a Team site designed for collaboration - but not what you want as default behaviour in a communication site, where you're simply trying to provide a library of downloads.
There is a setting for a document library, which is supposed to manage this behaviour. However, I found that when linking to a document from elsewhere (e.g. using the featured content web part) - this setting is ignored.
I found many workarounds and tips for how to go about forcing a document to download - but none of them worked reliably cross-browser. For example, a popular comment is to add ?download=1 to the end of the link. That works in Chrome, but not in Microsoft Edge.
The only method I could find that works reliably cross-browser, is this:
- Open the SharePoint document library, and find the file
- Click the context menu icon to the right of the filename, and choose the "Download" option from the context menu.
- When the file has finished downloading, visit the downloads tab in your browser, right click the download and choose "Copy link address" (Chrome) or "Copy download link" (Edge).
- You should find that when using this link - a copy of the file will always be download to your device, rather than being opened inline.
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