Excel starting multiple instances of IE

[Paul Hodges]

Hi,

How do I prevent excel starting a new instance of internet explorer whenever
I click on a hyperlink in a spreadsheet.
I have a spreadsheet with 3000+ rows. Each row has a cell with a hyperlink,
so the instances of IE can build up very quickly.
The IE/Advanced option "Reuse windows for launching shortcuts" is ticked,
but does not appear to have any effect.

Paul

 

[Guest]

that feature would only work on a shortcut already displayed in IE
Only workaround is to convert the spreadsheet into Word then Save As html
then open that file in IE. That would work...

 

[Paul Hodges]

Hi Mike,

Thanks for the reply.

To expand on the problem a little.

I came across a list on a french website of 3725 french words which french
children are expected to know
by the age of 16. I thought they would be useful for improving my french
vocabulary.

I imported the list into a column in an excel spreadsheet. Then using an
online translation engine, I cut
and pasted lists of words into the translator, translated, and cut and
pasted the
result back to the spreadhseet to get a second column in the spreadsheet
with
a single english word equivalent. Unfortunately this proved not to be very
accurate in a lot of cases. The translation engine not knowing in what
context
to take a word, noun, verb adjective etc, and in other cases, just getting
the translation
wrong.

Therefore in order to check and expand on the english translation, I found
a french online dictionary. I added a 3rd column in which I got excel to
automatically generate
a hyperlink to lookup the word in the dictionary. So I can now
scan down the list and with a single click look up a word. Based on the
result, I can change or add additional words to the english translation in
the second column.

Since its a work in progress it needs to be in an easily editable format.
Excel is ideal, but has the unfortunate IE side effect.

Making constant changes to the document in HTML format would be
considerably more of a pain, than changing a cell in a spreadsheet.

Perhaps its time to write a program.





Using an online translation engine, and a bit of cut and paste

 

[David McRitchie]

You could use Firefox as your default browser and then you can control
(within Firefox) whether you get a new tab in an existing window, or a new
window, open in same tab. You are going to have compromises when dealing
with two different applications. Tabbed browsing is builtin to Firefox. With IE
it is an add-on or is MSN IE (not actually IE).

The main problem with Firefox as your default browser as far as Excel is
concerned is that copying from a webpage table and pasting into Excel
does not work very well. So you want to revisit the same page in IE
and copy then paste into Excel for such things, there are extensions to
switch I'd use Launchy for switching from Firefox, and Fire Fox View
when switching from IE.
http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/firefox/firefox.htm#ext

Of course it depends on whether the application is just for you or not.
If several people are involved you can't win.

 

[Paul Hodges]

It's funny. Firefox has been set to my default browser for at least the last
six months, but I recently changed it back to IE, and I can't for the life
of me remember why, since I still use firefox, and its manually pinned
to the start menu.

Firefox solves the problem.

Under Options/Advanced/Tabbed Browsing there's an option to
Open Links from other applications in most recently used tab/window.

Does exactly what I want, reuses the same tab in the same firefox instance.

Thanks very much for your help David.