I have set up a drop down menu of regularly used office docs, some in Word and some in Excel. This is a great way to instantly access items like a fax page, headed letter or charts I update daily for example. The problem im getting is that if there is one office doc open I cannot then open another one - it just reverts to the already open document, even though im pointing to a new doc. Is there something wrong with the way my buttons are set up or is this "bound to happen" as it is a MS app after all! (I can open multiple items with no problem direct or from the open dialogue in Word or Excel)
Buttons are set as example : Function - W:\forms\Fax.doc; start in W:\forms; label and tip both set to "fax"; run - Normal Window.
I assume that your fax document shortcut is a Word document and not a template. If you use it as a template often (as I assume you would for different faxes) then set the shortcut to a template and it should then open a new document based on that template every tiem you click on the shortcut...
Hope this helps and that I understood you properly.
Thanks for the reply. Not sure we fully understood each other, but, you got me thinking about exactly how to do this and I seem to have sorted out the problem by changing the function to "Go" from the Opus standard drop down list (instead of naming the path there) and then naming the document path in advanced options. This then allows me to open more than one word different document at a time, which I was unable to do before. Thanks for your help.
Running the Go command by itself shouldn't do anything and definitely shouldn't have any effect on what Word does when you launch a file that's associated with Word.
The problem with Office is it only lets you open one copy of the same document. At least some Office programs (e.g. Excel) only let you open one file with the same name, even if the two files have different contents. I think it's all because of the (bad) design of VBA where you can refer to things in open documents by their filename (without path, so if Office allowed you to open two docs with the same name VBA macros would not know which was which).
You might find it works better if you copy the base document to a new name and then launch that, instead of the other way around. (But maybe not... Sometimes Office seems to know that a renamed document is a copy of another one. I think docs also have an internal name.)
Grew's suggestion should work better. Office has the concept of template documents which are physically the same as normal docs but with a different extension. When you launch a template document Office creates a new document which is a copy of the template. Office will deal with all the naming issues and make sure it's treated as a unique file and not just a copy of an existing file. Template documents exist to solve this exact problem.
Thanks also for your reply and the information, which is useful to know. However, just to clear this issue up (for me at any rate) I wasnt trying to open 2 docs with the same name, but 2 docs with different names. For example I might have the fax doc open but then want to also open a doc with a completely different name but that I have stored as a template (although I have always just used the doc or docx format) and asigned a button to. When Ive tried to do that using the file path in the function button it just brings up the already open doc and won't open the new one. By changing to the "Go" function and putting the file path in the advanced section I am then able to open any number of docs at the same time for some reason. However, following Grew's and your advice I think ill change from using docx to dotx in future as it makes more sense anyway. Thanks again.
