A refreshing feature of Microsoft Word 2007 is the ability for each document to open in a separate application window. This allows viewing multiple documents on your screen(s) simultaneously for easy reference or edits. Unfortunately Microsoft Excel 2007 does not ship with this feature enabled, however here are two ways to make it work for you.
These instructions are based on Microsoft Office 2007, aka Version 12. Some differences will exist for other versions of Microsoft Office.
This simplest solution involves an advanced setting in Excel, but it didn’t for me. Give it a try first before continuing further:
Office button -> Excel Options -> Advanced.
Under General, check ‘Ignore other applications that use Dynamic Data Exchange’.
An alternative solution requires editing the registry and modifying the default Excel file types and is described below.
Firstly you may need to update the permissions of that registry tree so that Administrators have full control over Excel’s file types.
Open the registry, and go to:
HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Excel.Sheet.12
Right click the tree and adjust the permissions to grant Full Control to Administrators
Then after that in explorer go to:
Options -> File Types -> XLSX -> Advanced
Append "%1" to the command and Uncheck DDE.
Unfortunately this is where I discovered that with a single file open, the Taskbar caption always begins with “Microsoft Excel – ” prepending the filename, and this makes it difficult to tell apart the applications in the taskbar when you can only see the first word or two.
A plausible workaround to the Taskbar caption is to create a custom add-in for Excel to load on startup that will rewrite the caption (albeit in this example the name is NOT updated if the file is closed and a new file opened).