Question posted 2014 · +34 upvotes
This bothers me for my whole IT life – I worked with 7 different versions of Excel over 20 years now, with big changes in each version, forcing me to search where the old features are hidden in the new version – but one single thing stays solid as a rock: the disability to open two files with the same name.
Sorry, Excel can’t open two workbooks with the same name at the same time.
So I’m really longing for an insight here, why this is still the case in Excel 2013, which was not even necessary to implement in Excel 95? Is there any technical or design reason within the Excel data structures or internal processings that it can’t handle two File objects with diffenrent paths but the same file name? I don’t want no Microsoft bashing here, I just want to understand the reason behind it.
Accepted answer +35 upvotes
Microsoft say here it’s due to calculation ambiguity with linked cells.
If you had a cell ='[Book1.xlsx]Sheet1′!$G$33 and you had two books named ‘Book1’ open, there’s no way to tell which one you mean.
This way of referring to linked workbooks by name in cells persists through all versions, and I doubt very much it will change.
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