Question Excel opens multiple files at startup

If you ended up here then you are probably pulling your hair because every time you start Excel you see many files opening, these files are always the same.

Checked the obvious places such as going to the Excel Menu>Option>Advance then scrolled down to General where there is a line that says "At Startup, open all files in:" and made sure nothing is entered there. Also check that on the C drive folder C:\yourUserName\Application Data\Microsoft\Excel\XLSTART there are no files.

If you checked the above and still having the problem then you need to go to the Windows Registry and delete this entire Key (folder): HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Excel\Options. Note 12.0 is for Excel 2007 and this can be 11.0 for Excel 2003 and so on.

The Key will get recreated with a clean slate when you run Excel next but if you want to only delete the parts that are causing the files to open and keep you are options intact then look in the right hand pane for the Options Key and locate and delete all OPEN values. You will see OPEN, OPEN1, OPEN2, etc… with the path and file names of the Excel documents that are opening.