Starting Office Applications Your Way Well, That's a Switch Helen Bradley
Wed 7/17/02 -- Double-click your desktop shortcut for Microsoft Excel, and the program launches with a new, blank workbook displayed. Ditto for Word -- the program loads and presents a new document, all pretty much as you'd expect. But what if you'd prefer something else to happen -- say, to have the program load with a blank screen instead of a blank document? You need one of Office's command-line switches -- little-known tools that let you do assorted things with applications as they open.
How switches work. A command-line switch or startup switch is a variable you can optionally append to a program's executable file or launch command that affects the program's behavior. Command-line switches are most frequently used with desktop shortcuts to alter the way the program starts up -- even, in Outlook's case, to start only a portion of the program instead of the whole thing (more in a moment).
Word without Document1. For example, to start Word with no document open, right-click your Word desktop shortcut and choose Properties, then the Shortcut tab. Find the "Target:" line and place your cursor at the far right of the command field, past the current contents (and outside the double quotation marks). Type a space, then the switch /n -- most switches are prefixed with a forward slash -- and choose Apply, then Close. Now, when you double-click the shortcut, you'll notice Word opens without a blank document.
Hey, it didn't work! Did you try the above, only to find the Shortcut tab for your Word or other Office desktop shortcut was blank (as in the screen capture below) or that you couldn't type anything in the "Target:" field? Don't panic -- Office sometimes creates special Windows Installer shortcuts that can't be edited (as detailed in Microsoft's Knowledge Base article Unable To Modify Office Shortcuts).
In this situation, you must create a new shortcut -- right-clicking the desktop and choosing New Shortcut, then browsing to C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office\WINWORD.EXE or wherever the executable file is. You can add the command-line switch to this shortcut.
Works in menus, too. In addition to desktop shortcuts, you can use command-line switches with Start menu commands. Choose Start/Programs and highlight the program in question, then right-click and choose Properties. You can make the same changes as you would for a desktop shortcut to modify how the program will load when you next use it.
Excel by itself. To start Excel without any workbooks open (and with the splash screen disabled), use the /e switch. Like the Word shortcut, this switch is appended to the far right of the "Target:" line in the Properties dialog, as in "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office\EXCEL.EXE" /e.
Outlook à la carte. As I mentioned, using command-line switches with Microsoft Outlook allows you to perform tasks with individual Outlook components without loading the entire program. For instance, you can create a Note by adding the command-line switch /c ipm.stickynote to the "Target:" line of a new Outlook shortcut -- repeat, a new copy of your Outlook shortcut and not the original, or else you won't be able to load Outlook in its normal mode.
When you double-click this new shortcut, a new Note will appear; complete it and close it, and it'll appear in the Outlook Notes folder when you next open Outlook normally. You can also use Save As to save the Note as an .msg file directly on your desktop, which gives you the functionality of creating and storing Outlook Notes on the desktop without having to open Outlook at all.
Other Outlook shortcuts. If it's not Notes you want, there are other startup switches for creating other objects with Outlook components without loading the full program. These include:
/c ipm.activity to create a new Journal entry; /c ipm.appointment to create an appointment; /c ipm.contact to create a new contact; /c ipm.note to create a new e-mail message; and /c ipm.task to create a new task.
It's a one-time thing. If you want to launch a program using a switch just once, you don't need to create a desktop shortcut or modify its Start menu listing -- just choose Start/Run and type the full path to the program (including the quotes), followed by the switch, just as if you were filling out the "Target:" field (or the "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office\EXCEL.EXE" /e Excel-with-no-workbook example above). Then click OK.
