I have an excel spread sheet pulling web queries on stock market data every few minutes. Every time it updates it jumps to the foreground and won't let me continue with any other app until the update has finnished. This never happened in 2007 so how can I turn this off? I am using windows 7 64 bit.
Thanks but the refresh is working perfectly. It is in someway related to the active window and windows pushing this to foreground. Maybe in Excel 2007 the refresh of data didn't make the window automaticalyl active whereas 2010 does.
I assume alt-tab moves to the next window. If I click on another app excel grabs it back again. I have about 8 differnet calls for data as info comes form different sources so i guess as each call starts it makes excel the active/foreground app. Each call lasts maybe 5 seconds so essentially i can't use any other app for a minute while it works through them.
I did some digging and saw related issues that involved the follwing solution
I have seen this issue before it's "Prevent applications from stealing focus" Unfortunately i didn't find a solution for Windows 7
You could try something that used to work in XP and sometimes in Vista
1, Go To Start > Regedit
2, Go to HKEY_CURRENT_USER > Control Panel > Desktop
4, Right Click and Click on Export, name it Registrybackup and save it
3, On Right side you can see ForegroundLockTimeout
4, Change the ForegroundLockTimeout value to 30d40 (Hexadecimal) or 200000 (Decimal) to 0
I was a little unclear on the last line, but I tried changing the registry to 200000 and rebooting but hasnt made any difference. I read that shoudl be the default but mine was set to 0. I have just chekced and it has sreset to 0. This seems a common problem as this guy posted
This seems to have fixed it. No idea why it changed back to zero. Useful tool to monitor your registry in case there is some app changing registry values is this
As a floow up on this I was then left with the problem others have found where the icon now flashes in the task bar. This is extremely irritating as it pops up over your application if you usually work with the taskbar hidden. You can change the number of flashes in the registry by ammending the registry value for ForegroundFlashCount in the same folder to 0 = continuous flashing or any number for a number of flashes. There is however no way to turn it off.
A number of other forums suggest using Tune Up Utilities as it has a function to turn of the flashing. I gave this a try and yes it does turn off the flashing but it also disables the ForegroundLockTimeout setting so instead you are back to the window popping to the front and grabbing focus!
I do wish they would stop trying to improve some things!!!
