How is an Excel session defined?

[Excel_VBA]

Please give many examples. If you have 3 workbooks open, how many sessions do you have? One or three?

 

[shg]

If you open them in the same instance of Excel (File > Open), you have one session.

If you start Excel again for each one (Start > Excel), you have three.

When you double-click a workbook, it will open in an existing Excel session unless you have Excel configured to Ignore other applications

 

[Excel_VBA]

If you open them in the same instance of Excel (File > Open), you have one session.

If you start Excel again for each one (Start > Excel), you have three.

When you double-click a workbook, it will open in an existing Excel session unless you have Excel configured to Ignore other applications

That is pretty much what I thought. So then:

A. Double-clicking a workbook opens a workbook in an existing session.
B. Enabling Ignore other applications then double-clicking a workbook
opens a workbook in another session.

Which of the two (A or B), would consume more memory? If B consumes more memory, which is what I suspect, why would somebody want to do this and enable Ignore other applications?

 

[Norie]

Where are you enabling 'ignore other applications'?

 

[shg]

Which of the two (A or B), would consume more memory?

You can answer that question for yourself. Try it both ways, and look in Task Manager.

 

[xenou]

If you have no idea why someone would want to do this then you probably don't have any need for it yourself. I really don't have any idea myself, and generally don't like to use multiple sessions of Excel at once. However, I have come across one or two members that said they prefer to work with more than one session of Excel. I don't quite remember why - it may be that in once case there was something about having two monitors and each Excel instance could be on a different monitor that way. Sometimes it seems that someone is using a dedicated Excel app in some particular way and they want it to run by itself unaffected by any other Excel programs (one reason may be so that it won't be shut down if you quit the other Excel application(s) that are running). I suspect some folks run invisible Excel instances this way in the background.

More often, people have ignore other applications checked somehow by mistake and can't understand what's "wrong".

ξ

 

[shg]

something about having two monitors

That's the case I usually see, and then people spend weeks asking questions about how to cut and paste across instances and related issues.

The other reason is when people are running a hidden instance of Excel doing something they don't want interrupted. In that case, it seems the feature would be more useful if it applied only to the session in which it was applied (like AutomationSecurity), rather than the entire application.

It would be nice if Excel were changed to a Single Document Interface.