This is something different than the normal things I would blog about. However, it’s useful for many people.
Everybody has multiple monitors these days, how annoying is it when you double click on a spreadsheet or Visio doc and it opens within the same instance of Visio/Excel?
So, I figured out how to set both applications to the new instance behavior which is default for Microsoft Word 2010.
Each application has a different way of doing it; I’ll start with Visio because it was easy.
1.Launch Visio 2010
2.Click File then Options
3.Click on Advanced
4.Scroll all the way down to the bottom and check the box that says “Put all settings in Windows registry”
5.Click OK & Close down Visio.
6.Launch “Regedit” (If you don’t know what the Registry is, just type “regedit” from the run prompt and hit enter)
7.Locate the following registry key
a.“HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Visio\Application\”
8.Find the following DWORD
a.“SingleInstanceFileOpen”
9.Change the value from 1 to 0.
10.Voila! Click your Visio docs from Explorer folders and watch them open in new instances until your heart is content!
Now I thought Excel would be done the exact same way, boy was I wrong!
I searched for a while until I found out how to set Excel to that behavior.
It’s a little more complicated than how it was done for Visio. Here are the steps.
1.Close all Excel Windows.
2.Launch “Regedit”
3.Locate the following registry key:
a.“HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT/Excel.Sheet.8/shell/Open/command”
4.Double click on the (Default) dword and change the value to the following:
a."C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office14\EXCEL.EXE" /e "%1"
i.Note the original value should be the following:
1.“C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office14\EXCEL.EXE” /dde
5.In the same registry key there is a dword named “command”. Rename this dword to something else like “OLDcommand”.
6.Locate the following registry key:
a.“HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT/Excel.Sheet.8/shell/Open/ddeexec”
7.Rename the ddeexec key to something else like “OLDddeexec”
8.Locate the following registry key:
a.“HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT/Excel.Sheet.12/shell/Open/command”
9.Double click on the (Default) dword and change the value to the following:
a."C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office14\EXCEL.EXE" /e "%1"
i.Note the original value should be the following:
1.“C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office14\EXCEL.EXE” /dde
10.In the same registry key there is a dword named “command”. Rename this dword to something else like “OLDcommand”.
11.Locate the following Registry key:
a.“HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT/Excel.Sheet.12/shell/Open/command/ddeexec”
12.Rename the ddeexec key to something else like “OLDddeexec”
13.Finally, that should be it. Give it a try and your excel spreadsheets should be launching in separate instances!