How-To Geek Forums / Microsoft Office
Many personal.xlsb open
(8 posts)
I've played around with this a bit and found that with my set-up: (which would be fairly typical. I believe, because I just reinstalled the OS back to the factory settings)
normally it would be impossible to have more than one personal.xlsb open at the same time UNLESS you've defined it as a Shared workbook - have you done that?
If you open different workbooks in the same instance of excel it will only open the single instance of Personal.xlsb. But if you open several workbooks in different instances of excel then it will try to open the Personal.xlsb once for each instance.
When you have separate tasks in the scheduler to open different workbooks it will open each workbook in a separate instance of excel hence the multiple instances of personal.xlsb.
One way around this is to have a single task that opens a blank worksheet that has this macro in the ThisWorkbook module;
Private Sub Workbook_Open()
Workbooks.Open ("C:\users\USERNAME\Documents\FILE1.xlsx")
Workbooks.Open ("C:\users\USERNAME\Documents\FILE2.xlsx")
Workbooks.Open ("C:\users\USERNAME\Documents\FILE3.xlsx")
End Sub
This will open all the workbooks in the same instance of XL and hence only one copy of Personal.xlsb
Is this a viable solution for you?
@moregg
Until I googled it I knew not of a Shared Workbook. No, I don’t share workbooks.
However, I do have a number of workbooks that open via the task scheduler. That may be the key. But why would the TS opening workbooks be different from me opening them?
I am not clear on what is an “instance” of Excel. Seems like every time I open a new Excel file (workbook??) it would be a new instance????
I will watch for TS workbooks opening on top of one another to see if this is what is happening.
If you have several workbooks open in the same instance of excel you can switch among them via View/Switch Windows where you'll see a list of all the workbooks you've opened. What you can't do easily is view them in separate windows. That's why many prefer to open workbooks in separate instances of excel. One way to do this is to double click on excel.exe and open a workbook and do the same for every workbook. Now if you go to View/Switch Windows you'll only see the current workbook listed. This is what happens when I open several workbooks vie the scheduler.
When you check your files tomorrow check to see if you can see them all listed in View/Switch Windows.
