How to open unsecured workbook when secured workbook is open

Hey there,

I saw a post on Mar '15 titled “Issue if a non-protected excel workbook is also open”. Has this issue resolved yet? We have the same questions asked by the clients regarding this issue. Whenever the open an unsecured workbook, they are not able to save it since it is opened in secured workbook windows. I have suggested them to open another excel application before performing this and it works fine but this is very cumbersome and significantly slows down the work.

Regards,
Randy

You can avoid the behavior thanks to this option:


Pasted image758×546 55.3 KB

This will prevent other workbooks from being loaded in the protected Excel instance.

Thanks for the immediate response! This is really helpful. Just a quick suggestion, the title you have for this feature is a little bit misleading because it says “Do not allow loading/saving other workbooks”, I thought it mean when the application’s running, it wouldn’t allow any other workbooks to be saved. Of course I didn’t want this feature because I wanted the clients to be able to save their other workbooks. My bad I did not read the further information on this feature.

Follow up question here, this feature does prevent other workbooks to be open inside the application, however, it won’t allow other workbooks to be open when no other excel instance available but the secured application (depicted in the picture below) . Everything works fine if there is another excel instance other than the secured application open in the system.


Capture error.JPG836×162 17.9 KB
.

I am aware that this is the issue with Excel 2010 or older because by default whenever a workbook is launched it won’t create a new Excel instance. So I believe what’s going on is the new workbook tries to use the secured Excel’s instance but XLSPADLOCK prevents in from doing so.

Do you happen to have any idea on how to solve this?

Best regards,
Randy

The sole workaround available now would be editing registry entries so that Excel starts a new instance each time. As explained here:

However, the EXE file cannot do this itself otherwise there would certainly be some antivirus programs that would trigger false positives.