Forum Discussion
Switch Workbooks functions
I suspect that you may have been using a very old version Excel. With your new PC, you also upgraded to a new version of Excel.
Here's a description of Ctrl-Tab
Ctrl+Tab : Switch to the next child window of a Multiple Document Interface (MDI) program
Your description lines up perfectly with the MDI interface. MDI was removed from Excel quite a while ago in favor of SDI interface. As a result, Ctrl-Tab won't keep flipping thru any more.
As a workaround, you may need to use Alt-Tab, which will tab thru all open apps.
Thank you for that answer, but it looks like a step backwards. I am subscribing to Office 365 on a yearly basis and assumed that they gave me the latest versions of Excel and Word on all my covered computers. I will try the Alt-tab instead, but that will step through all my open programs and workbooks, so I might encounter email, Google and other open tasks. I am running two screens and do normally have several tasks going on at the same time.
If your old PC had O365, then I don't really have an explanation. I believe the last version of Excel that had supported MDI was 2007, which pre-dates O365.
Here's a link to an Excel UserVoice forum discussing the elimination of MDI. You can see that Ctrl-Tab is mentioned in the suggestion.
https://excel.uservoice.com/forums/304921-excel-for-windows-desktop-application/suggestions/11706627-restore-mdi-file-handling-open-all-files-in-one-wThank you. I checked and both my computers are running Excel Version 2012 (Build 13530.20376)
The Alt-tab also just toggle between two open tasks, and you must hit it twice or more to get to the workbook you want. So it is still a mystery why the computers acts different.
