excel skips to another workbook for no apparent reason

In my case, it happens quite often, maybe every half hour on average, but new input data just gets lost rather than going into the wrong workbook. So as soon as I notice it's not responding, I hit enter and let it flip to some other open workbook, then reselect the one I'm working on and re-input the new data. Once I even saw it flip to another workbook when I wasn't even touching the keyboard!

Ken.

Checkout the response at the top of page 8. Hope that helps.

@JonathanKung Thank you. It seems that freezing stops when each file is opened in it's own instance, so your workaround works for now. But, since it is very cumbersome to do it manually every time you need to open a file, I hope you don't mind if I add one more step to your solution in order to automate it. So here it is. First, open the command prompt (I believe you need to open it as administrator in order for this to work) and change the default program for excel files from this:

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Root\Office16\EXCEL.EXE" "%1"

to this

"C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Root\Office16\EXCEL.EXE" /x "%1"

You can do this by using ftype command, like this:

ftype Excel.Sheet.12="C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Office\Root\Office16\EXCEL.EXE" /x "%1"

Of course, path to Excel executable may be different on your computer, so check that out first.

This will force all xlsx files to open in a new instance of Excel when you double-click on it in Windows Explorer. You can do the same for other files that can be opened in excel. For example xls. Just replace Excel.Sheet.12 with Excel.Sheet.8 and repeat the process. You can list all file type associations by executing ftype command with no parameters. I hope this helps someone until MS decides to address this issue sometime in 2025. :)

I have the same issue. It doesn't jump to another cell in the same workbook or worksheet. I think that's a different problem. Mine jumps to a different .xls file that is open and minimized, it might have links, it might not. If I have only one workbook file open, I don't see it happen. I can be quite fast in Excel when I'm working but when that "skip" happens, it slows me down and it's annoying. It takes my thought away from what I'm doing. So if anyone has any real fixes, I'd love to hear about it.

Same exact problem on my laptop!