Welcome Guest.   Make a donation to an author on the site May 24, 2013, 10:40:29 PM  *

Please login or register.
Or did you miss your validation email?


Login with username and password (forgot your password?)
Why not become a lifetime supporting member of the site with a one-time donation of any amount? Your donation entitles you to a ton of additional benefits, including access to exclusive discounts and downloads, the ability to enter monthly free software drawings, and a single non-expiring license key for all of our programs.

You must sign up here before you can post and access some areas of the site. Registration is totally free and confidential.
 
Free DonationCoder.com Member Kit: Submit Request.
   
   Forum Home   Thread Marks Chat! Downloads Search Login Register  
+  DonationCoder.com Forum
|-+  DonationCoder.com Software
| |-+  DC Member Programs and Projects
| | |-+  MS Office is breaking ALT-TAB
Pages: [1]   Go Down
« previous next »
  Reply  |  New Topic  |  Print  
Author Topic: MS Office is breaking ALT-TAB  (Read 3712 times)
offe
Participant
*
Posts: 2


View Profile Give some DonationCredits to this forum member
« on: September 13, 2011, 06:15:33 AM »
Since this is a forum for more advanced users. I would guess that I'm not the only one that get's annoyed by MS and the way they implemented Alt-Tab in Office. Starting back in Office 2k3 (if I remember correct) they introduced an extra icon in the Alt-Tab list if the office program had more than one document open.

Example of broken Alt-Tab
- Open one notepad and two excel spreadsheets
- Focus on notepad
- Alt-Tab to the first excel spreadsheets
- Alt-Tab to notepad
- Alt-Tab twice to get to the second spreadsheet.
Now instead the first excel spreadsheet got focus, since excel now have three icons in the Alt-Tab list. One for each spreadsheet and one for the application.

Is there anyone that have found a fix for this annoyance?
Or does anyone have the knowledge to make a program that fixes it?

Best regards
Ove Halseth
Logged
Stoic Joker
Honorary Member
**
Posts: 3,987



View Profile WWW Give some DonationCredits to this forum member
« Reply #1 on: September 13, 2011, 06:31:06 AM »
Hm... Played with it a bit, and can't quite duplicate the behavior (document tab'ed to got displayed). But the standard behavior for a MDI interface (which Excel is), would be to Alt+Tab into it, and then Ctrl+Tab through its open documents/child windows.

Or I could be missing something... *Shrug*
Logged
Renegade
Charter Member
***
Posts: 8,568



Tell me something you don't know...

see users location on a map View Profile WWW Give some DonationCredits to this forum member
« Reply #2 on: September 13, 2011, 06:39:33 AM »
Quote from: offe on September 13, 2011, 06:15:33 AM
here anyone that have found a fix for this annoyance?

The Office Suite applications can be annoying, and especially Excel...

If you open more than 1 spreadsheet in Excel, there are 2 possible ways to do it:

1) You have 1 "instance" of Excel that has 2 spreadsheets open in it.
2) You have 2 "instances" of Excel that each have 1 spreadsheet open.

Those behave differently. You should check that.

The default is #1. You must explicitly open a second instance of Excel for #2.
Logged
Slow Down Music - Super Simple - Where I commit thought crimes...

Freedom is the right to be wrong, not the right to do wrong. - John Diefenbaker


[ may-june 2013 ad experiment; click here to learn more about donationcoder.com ]

capitalH
Participant
*
Posts: 71


see users location on a map View Profile Give some DonationCredits to this forum member
« Reply #3 on: September 13, 2011, 07:00:42 AM »
The problem is Excel has a mixed interface (bit of MDI and a bit of SDI)

To the casual observer (so without going to Task Manager) Excel looks like it is SDI.

For each document there is a task bar entry, and there is no apparent tab in Excel to change documents (yes there is ctrl+tab and the menu entries but I did say apparent)

I would have preferred if Excel went either MDI or SDI.
With MDI they should
1) add a tab with open documents (on the ribbon please)
2) Add a save all option
3) Only one Taskbar+Alt+Tab entry

With SDI
1) one instance/document

Best case scenario of course would be to do both and allow you to choose.
Logged
offe
Participant
*
Posts: 2


View Profile Give some DonationCredits to this forum member
« Reply #4 on: September 13, 2011, 01:10:09 PM »
Ahhhhh, finally Grin
After googling till I almost dropped, I found this:
http://www.tech-archive.n...tup/2006-02/msg00115.html

After all there is an obscure checkbox that let you turn this insane behavior off.
And after reading the post, I found that I have forgotten the craziest behavior: The shared undo across multiple excel documents. Sometimes Excel fails to switch focus to the document that gets the undo command. So when you are pressing Ctrl-Z multiple times trying to figure out why it's not working. You are in fact destroying a document in the background!

Enjoy!

Ove B-)
Logged
Pages: [1]   Go Up
  Reply  |  New Topic  |  Print  
« previous next »
 
Jump to:  
   Forum Home   Thread Marks Chat! Downloads Search Login Register  

DonationCoder.com | About Us
DonationCoder.com Forum | Powered by SMF
[ Page time: 0.026s | Server load: 0.05 ]