I had one Excel workbook open, consisting of several sheets that I created over the course of today. I wanted to compare this--not line by line, just looking for shared data in two sorted lists--with another Excel file.

As you probably know, the (asinine, in my view) default behavior of Excel is that when you have two files open, one "covers up" the other, and there's no way to just drag the windows containing the two files so they don't overlap. This in itself makes no sense, given that Word handles this perfectly fine. If you open two files in Word, whether by double-clicking on both in the operating system or by opening one from within the program once the other is already open, yes they do overlap at the beginning, but if you drag the newly opened file to the side, you can see the old one just fine, and can copy and paste things and whatever.

So, I looked at how to view two files at the same time. There's an option to "view side by side", but this makes them behave like some weird set of conjoined twins, where you can't scroll one without scrolling the other. Now, I could see why one might want this *as an option*, but as a default it is again moronic.

So then I went to the last option, and here's where it takes the cake. There is an option to "open a new window", but this doesn't open a new BLANK window where you can go File-->Open and open a second file. That would make too much sense. NO, you get a "clone" of the original file you already have open! Except it seems like some kind of time-machine version of the file that undoes all the changes since the last save. I managed to open the second file in yet a third window, but then I had to "kill" the pesky clone of the first file, which was in my way. Somehow when doing this, it overwrote all the changes I'd made in the first file in the previous few hours!

I've gone back into the program and tried looking for unsaved files, yet the edited version of that first file is nowhere to be seen. There are no previous versions of it, either. I'm wondering, is there any way at all I can recover it?

Furthermore, now every time I open that first file, in addition to the missing changes, Excel insists on opening it in a window that's dragged off to the side and hidden, I'm assuming because that's what I did with the "clone" window before I closed that window. I'm wondering if there's an option to truly make Excel open two files like Word, where there is absolutely no implied linkage between the files unless I explicitly declare one, and where as long as I open just one file it fills the screen "normally", whereas if I open a second, I get two separate draggable sub-windows, and where there's no risk that when I do something to one window that it corrupts a file in another?

It's also possible that all of these issues have been corrected in newer versions of Excel, and that it's a matter of me still using the 2010 version that explains this. On the other hand, Excel had been around long enough by then I would have hoped this had been addressed by then.