Make Excel Open Spreadsheets In A Separate Window

If you spend a large part of your day dealing with boring, TPS-like reports, you’ve probably noticed that Excel 2007 won’t let you put spreadsheets side-by-side on your multi-monitor desktop. Luckily, there’s a fix for that.

The Online Tech Tips blog explains how to use a registry hack to add an “Open in New Excel Instance” item to your context menu—which will open your spreadsheet in a separate copy of Excel, so you can tile the windows or use them on separate monitors. There are a number of registry hacks included in the download-able file, so you can either make it the default, or add an extra menu item. The hacks are created for 32-bit Windows, but you can replace “Program Files” with “Program Files (x86)” in the download-able files to get them to work on 64-bit as well.

Readers will note that you can accomplish the same thing manually by opening another Excel instance, and then using File -> Open to launch the spreadsheet, but this registry hack makes the whole process much simpler.

Hit the link for the walk-through and the download-able registry hack—for more, learn how to save time with Excel’s double-click tricks, create an Excel Gantt chart with conditional formatting, or use Excel chart adviser to help pick the best visualisation for your data.

How to open a new instance of Excel 2007 workboooks [Online Tech Tips]