You can open Microsoft Excel from the Command Prompt, and you can also add additional parameters to the command to do things like open Excel with a specific template, or launch Excel in Safe Mode for troubleshooting.
Launch Excel Using Command Prompt
There are many ways to start Excel using Command Prompt, but if you want to launch Excel in its normal state (that is, the same way that Excel launches when you click the shortcut), then there are two different ways to do that.
First, there’s the simple way. Open Command Prompt by typing “cmd” in the Windows Search bar and clicking the Command Prompt app from the search results.
Command Prompt will open. To launch Excel, type this command and press Enter:
Excel should launch immediately.
Another way to open Excel is by locating the directory that holds the excel.exe file, changing to that directory in Command Prompt, and then running a simple command.
To locate the excel.exe file, you’ll need to be in the Program Files directory in Command Prompt. You can use the cd command to change the directory. Type this command in Command Prompt, and then press Enter:
You’ll now be in the Program Files directory. Next, you need to find out in which directory the excel.exe file is located. To do so, run this command:
The directory of the excel.exe file will be returned.
Now that you know the directory where excel.exe is located, navigate to that directory. Since we’re already in the Program Files directory, we can omit that from the next command. In our example, we’d run this command:
Now that you’re in the correct directory, all that’s left to do is to type excel in Command Prompt and press Enter.
Excel will now open. However, the main purpose of launching Excel from Command Prompt is so that you can control how it opens, and you do that by appending the various switches and parameters that are available to the command.
Excel Command Line Switches and Parameters
Here’s a list of command switches provided by the official Microsoft Office support site. Add these to the end of the start excel command in Command Prompt.
Using these commands, you can open Excel in a number of different ways.
No switch is required.
Example:
start excel “c:\Example Folder\file_name1.xlsx”
or
start excel http://MySite/file_name1.xlsx
Example:
start excel /r “c:\Example Folder\file_name1.xlsx”
or
start excel /r http://MySite/file_name1.xlsx
start excel /t “c:\Example Folder\file_name1.xlsx”
or
start excel /t http://MySite/file_name1.xlsx
start excel /a MyProgId.MyProgID2.1
Excel isn’t the only Office program that you can open with Command Prompt—you can also use it to launch Microsoft Word and PowerPoint. The commands can differ between applications, so explore which options are available for each one.
