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MS Office is breaking ALT-TAB

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offe:
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

Stoic Joker:
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*

Renegade:
here anyone that have found a fix for this annoyance?
-offe (September 13, 2011, 06:15 AM)
--- End quote ---

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.

capitalH:
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.

offe:
Ahhhhh, finally ;D
After googling till I almost dropped, I found this:
http://www.tech-archive.net/Archive/Excel/microsoft.public.excel.setup/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-)

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