Ok everyone, the solution to this problem is none of these, the Cortana fix helps in windows 10 but it also happens in Windows 7 and 8
The problem is a broken DDE call environment, this happens due to multiple reasons, mostly programs you have installed, give up, you cant fix it.
HOWEVER......
I stumbled on a fix by accident, i've always hated the forced "if you want 2 documents open they need to be inside the same excel window", so long ago i came up with a fix to do this.. which aparently also fixed the broken loading problem.
For those who care.. the problem is this:
In the registry theres this entry:
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Excel.Sheet.12\shell\Open\command]
@="\"C:\\Program Files\\Microsoft Office\\Root\\Office16\\EXCEL.EXE\" /dde
This command uses the windows DDE subsystem to send the file name to the excel client so it can open it when you double click it in windows explorer, this is done by sending the command via a DDE broadcast to all enabled EXE files running in your computer
and waiting for all of them to acknowledge or timeout that they have something to say about it before finally sending it to Excel to be open, if a program has DDE enabled but is not properly coded for it (which happens way too much), what happens is windows
waits for this program to respond or timeout, if there's more than one wrongly coded program, the timeout stacks, making it take up to minutes to fully time out, not sure why this behavior is this inefficient but what ever...
On to the fix, if you want to fix this AND at the same time get the ability to open multiple excel windows simply create a text file, paste this code in and save it as a .reg file, then execute it. it will solve your problem instantly.
If your excel is a different version to this fix navigate to the proper registry key and change the appropriate location.
I'm posting this because after hours of online searching i didn't find any real solution, and Microsoft clearly does not care enough to fix it so here you go guys, i hope you enjoy this fix as much as i do, opening 2 excel windows on a multi monitor setup
is BASIC software functionality, not sure why we have to do these hacks to make it work, im glad it also fixes the DDE problem.
if you like this fix up vote it so others can find it faster!
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Excel.Sheet.12\shell\Open\command]
; for other versions of excel change the location to wherever the excel.exe is at
@="\"C:\\Program Files\\Microsoft Office\\Root\\Office16\\EXCEL.EXE\" /e \"%1\""
"command"=-
[-HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Excel.Sheet.12\shell\Open\ddeexec]
@="[open(\"%1\")]"
[-HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Excel.Sheet.12\shell\Open\ddeexec\application]
@="Excel"
[-HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Excel.Sheet.12\shell\Open\ddeexec\topic]
@="system"
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Excel.Sheet.8\shell\Open\command]
; for other versions of excel change the location to wherever the excel.exe is at
@="\"C:\\Program Files\\Microsoft Office\\Root\\Office16\\EXCEL.EXE\" /e \"%1\""
"command"=-
[-HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Excel.Sheet.8\shell\Open\ddeexec]
@="[open(\"%1\")]"
[-HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Excel.Sheet.8\shell\Open\ddeexec\application]
@="Excel"
[-HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Excel.Sheet.8\shell\Open\ddeexec\topic]
@="system"
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Excel.Sheet.5\shell\Open\command]
; for other versions of excel change the location to wherever the excel.exe is at
@="\"C:\\Program Files\\Microsoft Office\\Root\\Office16\\EXCEL.EXE\" /e \"%1\""
"command"=-
[-HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Excel.Sheet.5\shell\Open\ddeexec]
@="[open(\"%1\")]"
[-HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Excel.Sheet.5\shell\Open\ddeexec\application]
@="Excel"
[-HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Excel.Sheet.5\shell\Open\ddeexec\topic]
@="system"
