Switching Workbooks in Excel for Mac
If you have a Mac and you use Excel as part of the Office 365 suite, then there’s a good chance you’ve gone crazy trying to figure out how the switching between different opened excel workbooks works.
If you google around you won’t find anything good except articles that look at the problem in a non-integrated MacOs/Excel way and therefore the sensation is shortcuts do not work.
Apple talks about Mission Control and Desktop spaces, Microsoft about Excel shortcuts, but users are puzzled because everytime the behaviour looks different.
The key aspect is understanding what happens in mac when you maximize an application.
Maximizing Windows / Full Screen in MacOS (Big Sur)
When you maximize an application pressing the green circle (top left of every application) in any program you use, MacOS maximizes the application correctly but behind the scenes it moves it silently in a dedicated ‘desktop space’ within what they call Mission Control. To check this you can press Ctrl-up arrow and on the top of your screen you will probably see the applications that have been maximized in their ‘desktop spaces’ while below the applications not in full screen.
This happens of course also with Excel when you create a new workbook and you maximize it. It goes straight to its desktop space as if it is a new application.
Switching between desktop spaces: Ctrl-left arrow / Ctrl-right arrow
All the applications which have been maximized have their own desktop space on top of the MacOS Mission Control and you can navigate them sequentially one by one by using the MacOS shortcut Ctrl-left arrow and Ctrl-right arrow. Alternatively if you have configured the three fingers gesture left / right you can use this to move between maximized windows.
When you use Excel each of the workbooks you have opened, if they have been maximized, they go straight to the top as if they were different applications and as you can imagine there is no Cmd-Tab or Cmd-` (typical excel commands) to switch between them.
Switching between Excel Workbooks
So everything depends on the ‘window status’ of your opened workbooks.
Case 1: all workbooks are maximized (green button—> enter full screen)
In this case to switch between them you can only use the MacOS commands as said above to move between the desktop spaces as each workbooks has its own desktop space: Ctrl-left / Ctrl-right. In this case the excel shortcut Cmd-` is simply ignored.
Note that if you have several applications maximized (I mean not only excel, but also others like powerpoint or else) the command Ctrl-left / Ctrl-right works sequentially (!) it means that if you have an excel workbook then a safari web page, a powerpoint ppt and another workbook you have to scroll left and right everythin in the middle which is a pain… In this case it’s better if you reorder manually the workbooks as you like so that you save time avoiding the other apps.
Case 2: all workbooks are not maximized (they are not in full screen mode)
In this case to switch between them you can (yes!) use the Excel shortcut Cmd-` . In this situation MacOS commands are ignored and Excel works as it should be.
Note: because the size of the workbook window, when it’s not maximized, can vary, I suggets to try the command Option-green button (the same you use for maximizing but with the option key pressed) or “window”-”zoom” that has the effect to enlarge the workbook window at the maximum size without really become full screen maximized. This is the good compromise where if all the workbooks are like this, the Cmd-` always works because the switch works within the excel context and if you have other applications opened they are skipped. So I tipically use this configuration and avoid the maximize of the windows.
Case 3: some workbook are maximized (they are in full screen mode) and some are not maximized.
In this case you should usea mix of the two commands. When you want to switch between the workbooks which are maximized and therefore in their Desktop spaces (you use Ctrl-left/right). When you want to switch between those workbooks ‘not maximized’, you can use (Cmd-`).
Case 4: Two workbooks are tiled left and right in a single dedicated desktop space
In this case the Cmd-` works to switch between left and right workbooks within the same desktop space, while if you want to switch between workbooks in the working space you have first to navigate to the group (Ctrl-left or Ctrl-1) and then you switch workbooks using Cmd-`
Conclusions
The behaviour is what you expect from competitors. For us it all depends on how MacOS manage the navigation between maximized applications in what they call Desktop Spaces in Mission Control and how Microsoft Excel manages the opened workbooks. Unfortunately maximizing a workbook from within Excel has for mac users the same effect as launching a new Excel application as that workbook goes to its desktop space on top and at that point the excel shortcut does not work, unless …see Case 4.
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