Hi Maz. I'm not sure if this will solve your problem or not, but it might be worth trying. I wrote many of the FFC classes that ship with VFP, and there is one for ShellExecute. Open _environ.vcx (found in the FFC folder) in the Class Browser, select the _shellexecute class. When I wrote the Class Browser, I added the ability to drag and drop the icon for a class into the Command Window to create a line of code to instantiate that class. So just drag and drop the top left icon into the Command Windows which will output a line like below:

o_shellexecute1=NEWOBJECT("_shellexecute","c:\vfp\ffc\_environ.vcx")

Then try something like below to see if it will open your Excel doc:

o_shellexecute1.shellexecute("c:\folder\excel.xls")