Loading XLA from the command line

Question

Hello,

I am running Office 2007 on a Vista32 machine.  I have a very large XLA sheet on a network drive that our company uses to help with financial stuff.  This add-in takes considerable time to load (30-60 seconds, depending on the network connection), and thus Excel is slow to open.  I find myself adding and removing the startup folder in "Excel Options->Advanced->General->At startup..." just to avoid the load times.

I was wondering, is there on the command line to specify a startup directory?  I was thinking of making two shortcuts: one for vanilla Excel, and one for Excel with the add-in's loaded.  I couldn't find anything specifically about loading XLA sheets at startup though.

Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!

Lucas

Answer 1

Maybe a different approach. Install a small addin whose only purpose is to load your big addin as and when you want it. IOW, your small addin loader has a button to load your big addin on user request. Don't install the big addin in the addin manager to load when Excel starts.

Regards,

Peter Thornton

Answer 2

I'm not sure about making the Add-In automatic, you after you add the shortcut for the Excel you want to use for the Add-Ins, you can right click the icon and select Properties from the popup menu that appears. On the Shortcut tab for the dialog box that appears, there is a "Start in" field where you can specify the full path to the directory you want to be the current directory for your session.