In recent versions of Windows, there are two kinds of shortcuts. The kind you
have doesn't allow editing, but you can throw that one away and make your own
shortcut of the editable kind.

To make your own, use Windows Explorer to browse to the C:\Program
Files\Microsoft Office folder, go down one more subfolder to the one for your
version of Office, right-click the WinWord.exe file, and choose Send To >
Desktop (as shortcut). Repeat for Excel.exe.

(No, I don't know exactly what the difference between the two kinds is, or why
Microsoft felt compelled to create a second kind that seems to be useless.)

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP        FAQ: http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so all may benefit.

Hi William,

The deployed shortcuts are tied to registry entries.  These are provided for a couple of reasons (a) they're part of the
repair/reinstallation process and can be restored by the Office installer if folks deleted them (b) it allows companies [primarily]
to deploy or hide the set of icons they want for Office and in locations they choose so that they're always in a consistent location
(c) to make them somewhat tamperproof for both security and consistency in location and predictability in what they do.

In a company deployment the ability to create a shortcut file may have been disabled, or the login script may simply harvest and
delete any .LNK files not expected to be there.

=============
A quite arcane bit of arcana, but anyway, here goes:

Many Word versions ago I learned to suppress the default, blank, Document1
from being created when starting Word from Program Files in the Start menu.

This is done by putting /n after the file path of winword.exe in the Target
field of the Properties of the Start menu shortcut. (Sensible applications
put it in Tools | Options, but no matter.)

I'm pretty sure at least one version I used of Word enabled that "/n" thing
to work in just the way it's described in Word Help. However, it wasn't long
before the shortcut created by an "out of the box" installation of Word had
that Target field grayed out when you look at the shortcut's Properties.
Then, to use the "/n" suppression, one has to create a new, standard,
shortcut to Word, with an active Target field, etc.

Can anyone tell me why the modern default shortcut has the structure it
does? Does it have something to do with other Office applications? (Also,
Excel's method for suppressing a blank file is different from, though
similar to, Word's.)  >>

Thanks for the responses, Jay and Bob