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Comment by samstave | Hacker News Reader

Separate question;

Why can I have multiple documents open in any MS Office App, which allow me to show one document on one screen and another on a different screen -- EXCEPT Excel?

This drives me NUTS. I can't easily compare data between spreadsheets without stretching the app across both screens -- then manually adjusting each document window within excel.

Who the hell is responsible for these inconsistencies over there?

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Right-Click on Excel Taskbar Icon > "Microsoft Excel" > A new window opens.

Still crazy that it doesn't do that by default, but there is a workaround.

Wow, that works. Jesus christ this has been a frustration for years.

Thanks

> Right-Click on Excel Taskbar Icon > "Microsoft Excel" > A new window opens.

Is that a windows 7 feature? It doesn't appear to work for XP. (Yeah yeah this desktop is in a govt dept that will get updated one day...)

Like the samstave this (mis)feature of Excel has been frustrating me forever.

Can't remember what the shortcut is (been on the mac bandwagon for 5 years) but it definitely works in XP as I was doing that for years. Maybe File > New Window or something like that.

Shift + left-click on the taskbar icon also opens a new instance of Excel.

Middle-click works as well

Awesome. Jesus I cant believe I never knew this....

Totally agree. I've spent tons of time pouring through their advanced settings and googling around for an answer to this. I must want to have 2 Excel windows open to compare values 10x more than any time I want to use their tiling features.

Actually, as noted in a sibling comment, you can open two excel documents. However, as far as I can tell, you absolutely cannot open two powerpoint documents side by side.

This is fixed in Office 2010. You can open up separate instances of PPT. In older versions you can, if you're feeling ambitious, set up a separate Windows user and create a shortcut that fires up ppt.exe under this new user's account (but still logged into your Windows account). This will give you two side by side PPT windows. Though copy-paste between these windows doesn't work, so it's a nearly worthless hack :)

This is one reason I like the Mac UI -- every document/file is its own window by default, so it's easy to put things side-by-side, even across monitors.

That is actually dependent on the application, but even when the default is tabs you can just drag the tab out to become a window.

You can open up another instance of Excel by going to Start > Run (or the Windows 7 equivalent) > "excel" and then opening up your document. Then you'll have two instances of Excel open each with their own window.

http://www.perivision.net/wordpress/2011/03/how-to-make-exce...

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