Absolutely the most stupid question, but can Excel 2016 open multiple spreadsheets inside the same instance like 2007?

With an Excel instance already open, right-click the Excel icon on the toolbar.

Hold down the Alt key and left-click Microsoft Excel 2016. After about 3-5 seconds, click yes on a pop-up asking if you want to open a new instance of Excel.

A couple things to note: this does not work if you select an existing file in the windows explorer dialog box and hold Alt. In my experience it only works on a brand new Excel window. You can then open an existing spreadsheet within the new window via Ctrl-O or File->Open

Also, this is very useful if you use Get and Transform aka Power Query/Powerpivot. Both will lock all spreadsheets under the same instance of Excel when loading data, but will not lock a different instance of Excel using the trick above. I've so far only used 2 instances of Excel to run 2 separate loads of data at the same time, but even that can be a time savings if you're dealing with millions of rows of data and still want to use Excel for other things.

/r/excel Thread