When IE opens Offices documents and PDF

This has been a cause of considerable irritation to me. Whenever there is a link to a file like a word document or a pdf file or a powerpoint presentation, and I click the link in IE, instead of asking me if I want to save it to disk, IE opens it. And if the file size is big, it puts you to sleep (I can’t afford broadband yet). Also, I noticed another thing today: one of my colleagues clicked on a link on a site and it opened a word document. Now the UI resembles MS-Word though it is only IE that’s opened the document… and guess what he did after he was done… he wanted to close the window and I asked him ‘but why!?’ ‘I wanna go to the previous page.’ Pat came the answer. All he had to do was hit the browser back button. But I wouldn’t blame him. Maybe microsoft should think about it and maybe look at something like open it as pre-formatted HTML or something, your thoughts?