Excel will not open a workbook when double clicking the file or opening an attachment in Outlook.

Had an issue where a user was opening excel files from explorer. Excel would load up, but the workbook would not launch. You could go to File Open and open the file just fine.

We had recreated his profile and made sure that there was nothing wonky in his xlstart folder and yet this issue still kept happening. Well, there is a check box  in  excels options that says something to the effect of disabling other application to access excel. If this is checked you will not be able to have outlook, explorer, or anything else open excel for you when you click on a file.

The problem was that this check box "somehow" got checked. Doing a little poking around on the Internet gave me the following information as well as booting up a test machine to play with it.

Here are the settings in the registry that were set.


Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00


[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Excel.Sheet.8\shell\Open\command]
@="\"C:\\Program Files\\Microsoft Office\\OFFICE11\\EXCEL.EXE\" /e"
"command"=hex(7):27,00,5d,00,67,00,41,00,56,00,6e,00,2d,00,7d,00,66,00,28,00,\
5a,00,58,00,66,00,65,00,41,00,52,00,36,00,2e,00,6a,00,69,00,45,00,58,00,43,\
00,45,00,4c,00,46,00,69,00,6c,00,65,00,73,00,3e,00,21,00,44,00,65,00,40,00,\
5d,00,56,00,7a,00,28,00,72,00,3d,00,66,00,60,00,31,00,6c,00,66,00,71,00,60,\
00,3f,00,52,00,26,00,20,00,2f,00,65,00,00,00,00,00

Notice the /e at the end, when that is replaced with “%1”, even if the check box in excel is checked to ignore other applications requesting information from DDE, the application will still request the information via dynamic data exchange. If the /e is taken out of the key, excel will open up a document, and a blank workbook will show up, but the file requested will not show up. At least in my testing, it looks like “%1” is the only way to get it to ignore the check box and get the file to come up.
Here is the reg dump for the key being set with “%1”

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Excel.Sheet.8\shell\Open\command]
@="\"C:\\Program Files\\Microsoft Office\\OFFICE11\\EXCEL.EXE\" \"%1\""
"command"=hex(7):27,00,5d,00,67,00,41,00,56,00,6e,00,2d,00,7d,00,66,00,28,00,\
5a,00,58,00,66,00,65,00,41,00,52,00,36,00,2e,00,6a,00,69,00,45,00,58,00,43,\
00,45,00,4c,00,46,00,69,00,6c,00,65,00,73,00,3e,00,21,00,44,00,65,00,40,00,\
5d,00,56,00,7a,00,28,00,72,00,3d,00,66,00,60,00,31,00,6c,00,66,00,71,00,60,\
00,3f,00,52,00,26,00,20,00,22,00,25,00,31,00,22,00,00,00,00,00

It’s hard to tell for sure why this is happening, but some of my researching suggests updates could switch these keys around. Also, I would like to note that on my test machines I was able to use excel just fine with the /e key at the end of the strings, until I checked the check box to ignore other applications. Once that check box was checked, I was unable to open files unless I put in the “%1”.

0_o Just another day in MS land I guess. I would be interested if anyone else has had issues with this.

Thanks!