Handy Excel Tip: Open workbook in new instance

I’ve written before about using Excel for some remote data collection and analysis tasks. One thing that often annoyed me in such situations was the inability to utilize multiple monitors. Whenever I wanted to break out a sheet, or especially when opening a new workbook, I found there is no way in default Excel to open the item in a new instance. It would always open in the same window, severely limiting potentially useful layout arrangements.

As is unfortunately common with Windows improvements… there’s a registry modification to solve it. All credit goes to OnlineTechTips: this article got me fixed up quickly.

Basically you just download a zip file, extract the contents, and rename the file whose title indicates the behavior you’d like in place. After this you just double click to run the file. This is a very convenient way to provide a fix, much easier than following descriptions of where in the registry tree to find what entries and what values to set them as. One of them even adds the option to open in a new Excel window to the right click context menu.

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