Any Excel gurus know how to run an external program i.e. notepad from excel?

I want to have something i can click on in a cell, that will grab the data in another cell and use it as a command line option to open notepad.

i.e. you click on the cell it executes "notepad d:\apps\doc\2323434.txt" as a result, with 2323234 being the data in a cell in the same row.

Any help would be appreciated!!

Not a VBA expert but...

Shell Function

Runs an executable program and returns a Variant (Double) representing the program's task ID if successful, otherwise it returns zero.

Syntax

Shell(pathname[,windowstyle])

The Shell function syntax has these named arguments:

Part Description
pathname Required; Variant (String). Name of the program to execute and any required arguments or command-line switches; may include directory or folder and drive.
windowstyle Optional. Variant (Integer) corresponding to the style of the window in which the program is to be run. If windowstyle is omitted, the program is started minimized with focus.


The windowstyle named argument has these values:

Constant Value Description
vbHide 0 Window is hidden and focus is passed to the hidden window.  
vbNormalFocus 1 Window has focus and is restored to its original size and position.
vbMinimizedFocus 2 Window is displayed as an icon with focus.
vbMaximizedFocus 3 Window is maximized with focus.
vbNormalNoFocus 4 Window is restored to its most recent size and position. The currently active window remains active.
vbMinimizedNoFocus 6 Window is displayed as an icon. The currently active window remains active.


Remarks

If the Shell function successfully executes the named file, it returns the task ID of the started program. The task ID is a unique number that identifies the running program. If the Shell function can't start the named program, an error occurs.

Note   By default, the Shell function runs other programs asynchronously. This means that a program started with Shell might not finish executing before the statements following the Shell function are executed.

Thanks