I needed to do this recently and ended up creating a .cmd or .bat
file, which contained
the actions I needed then getting excel to open and run that.

Think I had about 4 scenarios (based on excel user input variations)
so just wrote a .cmd for
each scenario and it worked fine.

It was simpler than trying to get excel to "drive" the .cmd session,
though I am certain that
ppl here would be able to get that to work it was beyond me!

Rgds,

Stuart