Excel 2003 in Windows 10 - single instance/dde?

Question

I'm running Windows 10 and Excel 2003 (it runs much faster than newer versions of excel).

The problem is that I generally prefer most files to open in the same instance of excel.

Is there any way to accomplish this other than manually opening each file from excel itself?

I've tried toggling a number of things (command line tweaks with /e %1 and dde messages and other options inside of excel itself to no avail...)

I've tried replicating the "action" for "open" with fileTypesMan from my windows 7 build which works fine but that didn't help leading me to believe this is some idiosyncratic windows 10 behavior, i.e., https://i.postimg.cc/C1TcqnTb/Clipboard-Image-1.png

it would seem as though Win 10 is ignoring the DDE section of the action from my attempts at manipulating those options

perhaps this is informative re: windows disabling DDE? https://office-watch.com/2017/dde-finally-dead-took-microsoft-long/ I tried adding registry keys as per the above but haven't tried rebooting just yet

Thanks

Answer 1

From https://smallbusiness.chron.com/open-second-instance-ms-excel-new-window-64110.html

Quote "Open your first instance of Excel, and then right-click the Excel tile on the Start screen. Hold down the "Alt" key and click "Open New Window" on the Start screen taskbar. Continue holding down the "Alt" key until you see a prompt asking you if you want to start a new instance of Excel"

Excel 2003 is not fully compatible with Windows 10 so the above may or may not work