Using Dual Monitors is common in many work places and really can help and increase productivity.  One common example would be to have two Excel Documents open to view one document and work in the other document.  Seems simple enough, however since the beginning of time this has been no easy task with relation to Excel.  For some reason Excel simply does not allow (by default) two different Excel workbooks to be open at the same time.  They still use the same parent window.  In Windows XP a few work-a rounds were available by changing File Associations.  A simple Google search for “Excel Dual Monitors” will return lots of results.

The big problem is that with Windows Vista the File Associations tab has been removed from Windows Explorer.  So the big question now is, how do we override this limitation.  I found a great blog post that describes simple ways to accomplish the task for both Office 2003 and 2007.

http://www.lytebyte.com/2008/05/13/how-to-open-two-excel-files-side-by-side-in-separate-monitors/

I have not noticed any problems with disabling the DDE (Dynamic Data Exchange) settings, however it does change some of the copy and paste functionality present in Excel.