I had an employee come to me with an unusual Excel workbook question. If he
has two workbooks open, they appear on the task bar as two separate
documents, but when he has one of them open on his desktop, they are both
open in the same Excel interface, so that when he closes one, the other is
still open behind it. He wants to know if there is a way to keep them as two
separate documents without any interface connection. I'm not sure of his
purpose in wanting to know, but I told him I would ask the experts.

It's an interesting question because I know that if you have two workbooks
open and you make changes in one then go to the other and make changes in it,
as you hit redo, the Excel interface remembers all the corrections between
the two documents and will jump the redo from one document to the other...so
in essence, as long as they are both open, they are connected in the the same
Excel interface.

Any ideas or suggestions, or can it even be done?

You can open separate instances of Excel, but that introduces copy/paste
issues as well as other problems.

Renee wrote:

I had an employee come to me with an unusual Excel workbook question. If he
has two workbooks open, they appear on the task bar as two separate
documents, but when he has one of them open on his desktop, they are both
open in the same Excel interface, so that when he closes one, the other is
still open behind it. He wants to know if there is a way to keep them as two
separate documents without any interface connection. I'm not sure of his
purpose in wanting to know, but I told him I would ask the experts.

It's an interesting question because I know that if you have two workbooks
open and you make changes in one then go to the other and make changes in it,
as you hit redo, the Excel interface remembers all the corrections between
the two documents and will jump the redo from one document to the other...so
in essence, as long as they are both open, they are connected in the the same
Excel interface.

Any ideas or suggestions, or can it even be done?

You have a lot of different questions in this post...

Depending on the version of windows, you can show group similar items in the
taskbar (or choose not to).

In WinXP, I can rightclick on the windows start button and choose properties.
Then on the taskbar tab, I can check or uncheck this option.

On top of that, excel has its own setting. (I'm not sure when this was
introduced--maybe xl2k???).

In xl2003 menus:
tools|options|view tab|check or uncheck Windows in taskbar

=========
As for the single instance or multiple instances of excel...

Personally, I like to have all my workbooks open in the same instance (or
session) of excel. It makes it easier to copy|paste formulas between workbooks,
to copy long strings in cells between workbooks, and it makes it easier to use
code in one workbook to control the other.

But you can open one instance of excel (anyway you want) and start a second
instance.

When I (rarely) want that second instance, I'll just use:
windows start button|run (or FlyingWindows-r keyboard shortcut)
type:
excel
and hit enter.

Then I'll use File|Open in this second instance to open the other workbook.

You could try changing a few windows/excel settings, but that seems to break the
ability to double click on the filename in windows explorer and have excel open
that file correctly (well, if the path/filename contains any space characters).

If you want to try that (I wouldn't):

Sometimes one of these works when you're having trouble with double clicking on
the file in windows explorer:

Tools|Options|General|Ignore other applications (check it)
(xl2003 menus)


And when you want to go back to what you had befo

Tools|Options|General|Ignore other applications (uncheck it)
(xl2003 menus)

--- or ---

Close Excel and
Windows Start Button|Run
excel /unregserver
then
Windows Start Button|Run
excel /regserver

The /unregserver & /regserver stuff resets some of the windows registry to
excel's factory defaults.

Renee wrote:

I had an employee come to me with an unusual Excel workbook question. If he
has two workbooks open, they appear on the task bar as two separate
documents, but when he has one of them open on his desktop, they are both
open in the same Excel interface, so that when he closes one, the other is
still open behind it. He wants to know if there is a way to keep them as two
separate documents without any interface connection. I'm not sure of his
purpose in wanting to know, but I told him I would ask the experts.

It's an interesting question because I know that if you have two workbooks
open and you make changes in one then go to the other and make changes in it,
as you hit redo, the Excel interface remembers all the corrections between
the two documents and will jump the redo from one document to the other...so
in essence, as long as they are both open, they are connected in the the same
Excel interface.

Any ideas or suggestions, or can it even be done?

--

Dave Peterson