Adventures in home working

As a keen user of multiple displays – Excel really frustrates me, with its inability to open multiple windows on different displays. 

I found a hack that involved manually resizing the Excel main/parent window so that it spanned multiple displays and manually dragging Excel child windows onto other displays, which is ok, but not perfect for me.

However I also found that if you have Excel running that you can launch a second copy just fine so long as you launch it from Internet Explorer. 

Since I use Maxthon I then realised there was an even easier way, just define a new external tool as follows:

1. Open the tools menu
2. Open the External utilities sub menu
3. Click +
4. Browse to Excel.exe
5. Save

And that’s all there is to it.  Now you can launch as many copies of Excel as you want and place them wherever you want

If you use multiple monitors then you need Ultramon.  I have three and I really don’t know how I would use them effectively without it.  It makes the whole experience so much more natural.  My favourite features being:

1. The ability to drag maximized windows by the task bar and drop them onto other displays
2. The ability to have a wallpaper made up of three different images stitched together across the three displays
3. The Smart Taskbars that get added to the secondary displays, these are just like the real Microsoft taskbar that is restricted to the primary display and they only show the applications actually showing on their display.

Combined with Synergy – which allows me to use my desktop keyboard and mouse to control my docked Tablet (my fourth screen) its all very slick.

Well it was anyway – up until Vista – because with Vista beta 1 of Ultramon 3 was really flaky and lacking in functionality,  I still used it because I can’t live without it – but it was very frustrating.  Now my hero Christian Studer has released beta 2 and wow! what a huge improvement it is.  I can now really recommend Ultramon again and life is so much easier