Excel seems to disable all windows hosting any excel content when it opens a modal dialog.

Steps to reproduce:

1. Enable the preview pane in windows explorer.

2. Browse to an excel file, so that the previewer is showing it.

3. Open an excel window, or focus on an existing one.

4. Open some modal dialog in excel, for example "Insert..." from the context menu.

5. The windows explorer window with the preview will be unresponsive until you close the dialog in excel.

It is also annoying that a modal dialog in one excel window disables all excel windows. That can be excused, but the above behavior is clearly wrong. It actually causes a permanent freeze in conjunction with our shell extension when the preview happens to be loaded when the dialog opens, but is unloaded before it closes.

EDIT: So to clarify, this is mostly just a bug report, but if anyone can suggest some way to deal with this, that would be great. Could you make the previewer use a separate excel process? Would that help?

• Edited by OK_MF Friday, January 30, 2015 1:39 PM Make it a question

This is obviously by design for all version of Office suites. The modal dialog is occupying the process, so you cannot using the previewer in Windows explorer.

To have MS change/update this behavior, you probably need to submit a ticket to them.