MS Excel 2011 - do workbooks open in separate windows?

[j.asher]

I've been using MS Office 2008 on Lion and I'm thinking about upgrading to 2011. I use MS Office 2010 for Windows at work, and one of the things we all hate about that version is the way that it opens workbooks as 'tiles' within a 'mother window' (so you can't view them side by side or make use of multiple monitors) as opposed to within separate windows. There is a workaround but it's painful.

I've been trying to work out whether this 'feature' is also present in Office 2011 for Mac but haven't been able to find out. Hopefully it isn't, and the default option is to have each spreadsheet open in its own window so I can maneuver them across multiple monitors. If there is a simple workaround that would be fine too.

Any enlightenment from current MS Office 2011 users would be greatly appreciated!

Julian

[colshine]

Each workbook has its own window.

[James Craner]

I would recommend the upgrade to Office 2011, It is a lot quicker than the Mac 2008 version and windows version compatibility is also noticeably better. Pivot table support is now consistent with the Windows version. Excel for Mac 2008 used to drive me mad sometimes. The calculation engine still sucks in the Mac version compared to Windows though.

[j.asher]

Thanks a lot for your feedback - sounds like the upgrade will be a good move. I'm using a 2011 MBA running Lion and have read that some people think it runs slow under Lion - do you have any experience with that?

[James Craner]

I would definitely upgrade the OS to Mountain Lion, it is a much better OS, Lion is regarded as one of Apple's weaker OS X releases.