I have posted the following question about 2 months ago on computing.net and received no answer. Hopefully this specialized forum there is somebody who can help me.

I am using MS Office 2007 and have made a spreadsheet in Excel that I use as a table to keep track of my progress with some work I am doing. In that spreadsheet there are no formulas, just data that I put there. In one column I have made hyperlinks so that per row I can open a corresponding text file, either in WordPerfect or Word. The problem is however that all hyperlinks open a new instance of that program with the file included in the hyperlink. What I want is that the hyperlink just opens as a new window in either Word or WordPerfect. The settings in Word are that it will only show one icon on the taskbar, even if there are multiple windows, so I am not confused with the standard setting that Word shows a separate taskbar icon for each window. In Windows Task manager I can see that every time a new program instance is started, i.e. if I open 3 WordPerfect documents there are 3 instances of WordPerfect running and the same is true if I opened Word documents. Because this problem exists with hyperlinks linked to Word as well as WordPerfect documents, I already reached the conclusion that it must be an Office issue. Moreover, when I make a hyperlink in Word I encounter the same issue that the link is always opened in a new program instance. Also, when I make a hyperlink in QuattroPro it does open every hyperlink in a new window in WordPerfect or Word, which is how I want it.

I have looked for settings in Word and Excel, to see if I could find anything there and also in the hyperlink dialog box. I also did quite some Google searching, but I have found nothing so far.

Does anybody know how I can make Office open hyperlinks in new windows instead of new program instances? Any help would be greatly appreciated.