A lot of questions have been submitted on how to do this on Excel 2003. So I did some testing and found that the solution is very similar to the newer version of Excel 2007.

On your Windows XP pc, close all of your open applications.

1. Open (double click) the "My Computer" shortcut on your desktop
2. click on tools, and then click on folder options…
3. on the third tab called File Types, scroll down to file type XLS and select it. ( click once on it with the left mouse button)
4. The XLS file type should now be highlighted, click on the Advanced button.
5. Again Single click on the Open action and then on the right click on Edit
6. In the second box that says "Application used to perform action:", go to the end of the string and add a space then add "%1" . You will need to add the quotes in order to pass a path that has spaces in it. (for those that don’t know what this means, just know you need double quotes like this "%1"
   Your string should look like something like this:
   "C:\Program files\Microsoft Office\OFFICE11\EXCEL.EXE" /e "%1"

7. uncheck the "use DDE" and click on OK
8. Click on OK and and finally on the folder options window click on close.

Now, if you double click on a Excel 2003 spreadsheet and then double click on another Excel 2003 spreadsheet, they should both open in their own window.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 11th, 2008 at 4:21 pm and is filed under Microsoft Office.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.