excel skips to another workbook for no apparent reason

Awesome good find! Thank you for posting that alternative workaround to automate it.

I believe I diagnosed the root of this problem. But I have not necessarily determined a "fun" solution. The issue has something to do with the automatic movement of the active cell upon clicking enter. Excel lets enter move to the right, or down or other such things. There is some sort of glitch or special situation that moves the cell to a different cell in a different open workbook instead of the one you are currently in.

I have solved the problem by going into Options_Advanced and unclicking the "After pressing enter, move selection" setting.

It is a little odd because I used enter to move around the spreadsheets and I am having to adjust my behavior. But the random pop up spreadsheet issue is gone.

Glad this helps KyleL630, but no; this cannot be a root or proximal cause.  I have always had moving selection after pressing enter turned off.  (I hate that default whenever I use someone else's computer because I spend a lot more time editing equations than data entry.)

This might be related. If I have file preview switched on and opening a file in excel, and as soon as I select an excel file it jumps to another excel session.

Something worth trying is to switch off file preview mode in file explorer and see if this stops the skipping behavour.

So annoyed! this exact issue is happening to me virtually every time I edit a cell by clicking into the box above the worksheet then hit enter.

@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. :)