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Comment by CamperBob2 | Hacker News Reader

How about letting me open more than one document window, then implementing bikeshed performance improvements that perhaps one in a thousand users will ever notice?

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You can open multiple Excel instances since at least Excel 2003 but Excel would not go out of its way to open files in a new instance if you just double click on the file.

Right, which is how no other Windows application in the 69,105 known planes of existence works. :(

If you click on a link, an internet shortcut or just your browser icon again you don't get a new instance.

Really? I at least get a new tab, a new window if I've asked it nicely to.

New instance =! new window/tab

Prior to tabbed browsing, browsers acted like 'normal' (SDI) Windows apps. The complaint about Excel is that it's an 'old-fashioned' MDI application and is missing UI widgets for easily switching between documents. (And that it's behavior is inconsistant because you can easily open multiple root windows.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_document_interface

You do if you configure your browser that way.

Excel doesn't allow you to do that, even though the code clearly supports it. (As others have said, you can launch multiple copies with their own windows by running the .exe manually.) As far as I can tell, it's just a matter of someone at MS being an asshat.

Which browsers do that, if I may ask?

Which ones don't? In Firefox, it's simply a matter of checking "Open new windows in a new tab instead" if that's what you want. I leave that feature enabled in Firefox, but I would prefer that Excel didn't work that way. It would take five minutes' work to give me the option.

In any case a tab-based Web browser is a completely different sort of application than Excel.

Which has nothing to do with instances of the browser.

And your point is...? Are you somehow attempting to justify the way Excel behaves by talking about Web browsers?

Excel is, for good or ill, one of the engines which settles the dispositions of multi-billion dollar calculations of dollars every day. For certain high-value, high-influence clients this is a feature worth having.

In case you're wondering: yes. I wrote and partly rewrote the above sentences while distracted.

No, you're right, I'm sure better calculation performance is useful to a definite subset of valuable customers. But fixing the UI shortcomings that almost every serious user has been complaining about for years should be a higher priority.

Microsoft actually has competition now, in case they haven't noticed.

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