Excel 2007, one instance working causes others to hang? I'm sure this wasn't the case in 2003

Question

I'm working on some VBA heavy sheets in Excel 2007. At my previous work we had a lot of sheets which were calc-ing for a long period ( valuing trades etc ) and if you opened another 2003 session completely they didn't interfere with each other.

It seems in 2007 if one Excel session is running and is working hard on VBA then other Excel sessions also hang. It's most annoying as I can't even code in the VBE while the other runs.

Has anyone else noticed this? I am on an 8 CPU workstation and it is nowhere near flat out. The only thing I can think of is that they do both load the same .xla's on start up but I would have thought each xla would be inside the seperate Excel sessions?

Answer 1

No matter how many Excel workbooks (of one version) you open, they all still operate off of the same process. If one workbook demands all of the resources of that process, then all of the workbooks will suffer the same lag.

Different versions of Excel, however, will not interfere with each other. If you're running both versions, you could relegate one version to a specific task and then use the other. It is also possible in 2003 (and perhaps 2007) to spawn different instances of the actual application by starting Excel from the Start menu while Excel is already open, but that's known to cause errors, especially if you utilize a personal workbook to store macros or other data. If both 2003 and 2007 are trying to open the same personal workbook, you'll wind up with the same issue.