excel skips to another workbook for no apparent reason

Hi everyone,

I work in technical support at my company and have been working with a client over several months with this exact same issue (We've already tried collecting logs, process monitor, disabling antivirus and third party software, reinstalling software, etc).

I stumbled upon this post, hoping to find a resolution, but like everyone else, saw Microsoft had no response. The good news is that I may have found a workaround!!

My user explained that the issue does not occur on Excel 2010, only  Excel 2016 with the same worksheets. We believe the issue is related to EXCEL 2016 (and maybe Excel 2013) opening all workbooks under the same EXCEL.EXE instance (in other words, multiple excel.exe processes running when more than one excel file is open), which may cause issues with other 3rd party add-ins. 

Solution - open Excel files in separate instances using these steps:

1) First, close excel and make sure all "EXCEL.exe" processes are closed in the task manager.

2) Type "run" (without quotes) in your windows search bar (Bottom left menu, windows icon)

3) Within "Open Field", type "excel /x" (without quotes).

-This will launch EXCEL in a separate instance, and from here please open the excel file you would like to use.

-Use this process again to open up your secondary or any additional workbooks.

- The reason for doing it this way is because opening more than one Excel file from the desktop on Excel 2016 will open them up all within the same EXCEL.EXE instance (check Task Manager).

- Using the 'run', and 'excel /x' switch will open up each workbook in it's own EXCEL.EXE instance (check Task Manager for multiple EXCEL.EXE processes)

So far this has worked well. 

Hope this helps :-)

Jon

TLDR: Follow steps on this link to achieve the same result above:https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/3165211/how-to-force-excel-to-open-in-a-new-instance-by-default

It just seems strange that nobody else seems to be having this problem.  Usually when I Google any type of technical problem someone else is having the same issue.  But with this one, nada.

Thanks for your reply.

It began happening when excel changed to having each workbook in a separate window.  I'm not sure which version change that was.  It happens with several workbooks, not just one.  It tends to occur in the same column within a workbook.  It skips to a cell in another open workbook.  I usually have several workbooks open, usually minimized.

I have a new company issued laptop with Windows 7 Enterprise and Office 2013 loaded running on a corporate network. I work daily in Excel with multiple spreadsheets open. I'm usually only editing one, and have others open to read initial data presented for me to work on. Normally I've already started working on only one, but with emails coming in, I'll open others to review. When I get back to working on my initial spreadsheet, and hit return to go to the next cell to change, I am unable to type in the cell or do anything until I hit return. When I do it brings one of the new spreadsheet up that I have NOT been editing. Once that happens, I can minimize that spreadsheet, go back to my working sheet and continue. This happens many times each day, and is very annoying.

After posting this, I counted usually editing two cells before I have to jump back to the same workbook in which nothing has changed.

Any help would be appreciated!!!

Thanks,

Chris

It is july 2nd, 2019

This issue is happening to me everyday while I work on multiple excel sheets. It is very annoying -- if I miss that it happened for whatever reason, it will edit a different worksheet and sometimes change something very important

this is unacceptable microsoft