If you look at excel's help and search for startup switches, you'll see that you
can add /r (slash r) to your target to open a specific workbook readonly.

I used this:

"C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE11\EXCEL.EXE"
/r "C:\my documents\excel\book1.xls"

(all one line)

And it worked fine.

Your path to excel.exe and the to the workbook may be different.

Mark wrote:

can i create a shortcut to open a spreadsheet read only?

With a tag or such, in the shortcut?

--

Dave Peterson