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.

I have to say I have never experienced the problem you describe. Every version of Excel I have used, including Excel 2010, allowed me to open several files and have them all in different positions on the screen. I can drag the outer edges in and out or up and down to resize them and place them side by side.

Try double clicking on the title bar of each Excel document window. This should reduce the window size to less than maximum so you can move it around.

Good luck!!!

I assume by the "title bar" you mean the top border of the window where the filename is displayed. This just drags the window around, but the window of any file opened earlier is not visible behind it.

The problem isn't that the window occupies the whole screen, it's that the two files are effectively open in the same window, yet only one is visible at a time, without any kind of tabs to switch back and forth. And, even if there WERE tabs, it wouldn't help because I sometimes need to see several files simultaneously. Even minimizing the window to the taskbar doesn't show the other file. The earlier file IS open because when I close the more recently opened file, the other one is then visible again.

In the mean time I've re-done the work and have managed to turn off the coupled scrolling when using the "side by side" option. It's still clunky but at least doable.

I assume you have excel icon on desktop.

Start Excel from icon, and open 1st workbook;
Start again Excel from icon (Or from Start button when you have older than Windows 10. I'm not sure how excel behaves when to open it 2 times at program search in Windows 10) - the new instance of Excel is started - and open 2nd workbook.

Now you can resize both Excel instances indepently, place them on same screen not overlapping, drag one of them into another screen, when you have 2 of them, etc. The minus is, that sometimes you can't use PasteSpecial features between 2 instances.