Technically, some elements are shared between the Ribbons, such as the fill color (the paint can icon). In Excel 2013, Microsoft introduced the Single Document Interface (SDI), where each workbook has its own Ribbon. In these versions it is easy to create a new instance of Excel, right click on the Excel application in the dock and click the Excel icon from the menu. This was called the Multiple Document Interface (MDI). In Excel 2010 and prior, workbooks open within a single parent window (i.e., they all share the same Ribbon and interface). Apart from sharing the same system resources, the instances are entirely separate from each other, therefore running the slow macro does not prevent you from working.
It is possible to run the macro in one instance, whilst continuing to work in another. This is extremely useful when needing to run a macro which takes a long time. They had recently been upgraded to Excel 2016 from Excel 2010 and were struggling to open multiple instances of the Excel application.Įach instance of Excel can have it’s own application settings (such as calculation modes). In this post, I want to share the answer to a question I received from a reader.
