Ooo. Way out of my depth there Merri.
Took me ages to work out that the DDE method didn't work. Not easy debugging a compiled program with messageboxes. There an easier way?

Not yet tested your one LaVolpe. Think it's simple enough for me to be able to implement.

I've set everything up already using DDE. I have associated the files using **********. Would that file association method be any different in the way it generates a command$? I think I need the all the files in a delimited string so that I can cycle through them and open them one by one.
The page says: "To retrieve the name of the file(s) used as the start-up parameter, use the Command$() function in VB."
file (s)