Open multiple workbooks in an instance of Excel 2013

do you mean manually opening Excel workbooks ? yes you can open as many as you want. Thru VBA the instruction workbooks.add will create a new workbook under the same Excel application already started. And Workbooks.Open filename:="My Filename and path" will open the file name called My Filename and path

OOPSSS I just noticed you mentioned Excel 2013 !!! sorry do not have this version but would be surprised it is not the same as older versions as explained above. Will chk anyhow and revert.
gowflow

If I had a dollar for every time I have read "the benefits of upgrading are not worth the headache" well...and so far that's my take on Office 2013. I played around and managed to open 2 workbooks in the same instance of Excel - I did a repair installation and that seems to have solved that problem. I agree with what you say except for the fact that I most often have worksheets (2 or even 3) tiled horizontally which seems to hog up much more real estate. Even on my giant 25" screen that's too much for my tastes unless I have Excel maximized. Also I didn't realize that the Skydrive hocus pocus is what was slowing it down - seems like the file menu is painfully slow. is there a way to disable that "feature"?

Letting someone else keep my data...would give me the night terrors.