Visualforce Developer Guide

Introducing Visualforce
Tools for Visualforce Development
Getting a Quick Start with Visualforce
Customizing the Appearance and Output of Visualforce Pages
Styling Visualforce Pages
HTML Comments and IE Conditional Comments
HTML Tags Added or Modified by Visualforce
Using a Custom Doctype
Using a Custom ContentType
Setting Custom HTML Attributes on Visualforce Components
Offline Caching Using the HTML5 manifest Attribute
Render a Visualforce Page as a PDF File
Standard Controllers
Standard List Controllers
Custom Controllers and Controller Extensions
Live Controller (Pilot)
Advanced Examples
Overriding Buttons, Links, and Tabs with Visualforce
Using Static Resources
Creating and Using Custom Components
Dynamic Visualforce Bindings
Dynamic Visualforce Components
Integrating Email with Visualforce
Visualforce Charting
Creating Maps with Visualforce
Render Flows with Visualforce
Templating with Visualforce
Developing Salesforce Apps with Visualforce
Adding Visualforce to a Salesforce AppExchange App
Using JavaScript in Visualforce Pages
Communicating Across the DOM with Lightning Message Service (Developer Preview)
Best Practices
Standard Component Reference
Appendices
Glossary
PDF

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Using a Custom ContentType

You can specify a different format for a Visualforce page by using the ContentType attribute on the <apex:page> tag. This sets the Content-Type HTTP header for the response to the value of the page’s ContentType attribute.
The ContentType attribute takes a Multipurpose Internet Mail Extension (MIME) media type as a value, such as application/vnd.ms-excel, text/csv, or image/gif.

Browsers can behave unpredictably if you set an invalid ContentType. For more information about valid MIME media types, see http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/.

Note

Microsoft Excel ContentType Example

To display Visualforce page data in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet, use the contentType attribute on the <apex:page> tag, and specify a value of application/vnd.ms-excel.

For example, the following page builds a simple list of contacts. It’s a simplified version of the example shown in Building a Table of Data in a Page.

To display this page in Excel, add the contentType attribute to the <apex:page> tag, as follows:

If the page doesn’t display properly in Excel, try a different MIME type, such as text/csv.