Hi Anne,

If anything, what you suggest would result in the oposite of what I
want, wouldn't it?

I tried it anyway, and I get the shortcuts to open all the documents
using the same instance but there's only one icon in the taskbar for 3
documents.

I did a bit of tweaking, as follows:

Checked the "Ignore other applications" box in settings/general.
Went to explorer's file associations, and disabled DDE there.
I also added quotation marks around the %1 after excel (that took are
of the problem I was having with files with multi-word names.

Seems to be doing what I want, except that if I click on a shortcut
more than once, excel tries to open a file that's already open in
another instance, a second time.

Am I going in the right direction here?

Thanks!

Alex