Open Excel Files as Separate Windows

[Guest]

In Word, you can open 2 documents that act as completely separate programs,
being allowed to more one to a second display, etc. In Excel, how do you do
that? I don't want to have 2 files open inside of Excel, but I want to have
two totally separate instances of Excel open. Please help?!

 

[Dave Peterson]

Open the first workbook any way you want.

Start a second instance of excel.
either put a shortcut to excel.exe on your desktop and use that
or
windows start button|run
type:
excel
and hit enter

Then file|open the second workbook.

 

[Guest]

Yes. That works. Is there a simplier way?
-----------------

 

[Dave Peterson]

I think it's the easiest/safest...

This may help (or hurt).

If you open files by double clicking on them in windows explorer....

You could try:

Tools|options|General tab|Ignore other applications (check it)

Then double click on the workbook in windows explorer.

And be aware that turning this setting on sometimes gives errors with workbooks
that contain spaces in their path/name:

C:\my documents\excel\my book.xls

The error will look kind of like:
cannot find c:\my ..
then
cannot find documents\excel\my
then
cannot find book.xls

Or it may just open excel and not show you the file that you clicked on.