Entirely Disable External Linking in Excel/Formulas?

Hello all

I assume this is more of a 'Settings' question than anything but as follows;

I use excel for my day to day Personal & Family accounting and a fair amount at work, and if I had just one complaint it would be the automatic External Linking in formulas, for the life of me I cannot find a way to stop External linking entirely.

I have run into this issue multiple times where I am working in one Excel document, need to borrow a formula or even just data from another document, open up the other document, copy the formula/data, and go back to my 1st document, clicking the cell I want to copy to, only to have the 2nd document think I want to link the cell I just copied from to my 1st document.

aka. The cell formula in 2nd document will automatically input

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Is there ANY way to stop the formulas doing this? (Besides having to hit Esc EVERY time) I don't use external linking so I wouldn't mind it being gone entirely, I only needs formulas to work in the document they exist in, not other documents. I have trawled through many settings pages now, nothing I changed seems to stop it from happening. Is it just an Excel 'Feature' that cant be turned off that I will need to make a Request to M$ to fix, that will be Ignored entirely?

I've already had to accept the fact that in Office365 I cannot have the documents have separate 'Undo/Redo' commands, which is a pain in its own when I am editing 2+ documents at once, but my issue with the External Linking is a daily occurrence that really gets on my nerves since I moved from my previous Office suite to O365 and I've had enough.


Thanks for any help on this

That is where the problem lies, when I copy just part of the formula form the formula bar (Whole cell copies are simple and easy, but I dont often need the whole thing), when I am copying, all is fine, its when I go to the other document, the moment I click a cell (cannot right click for whatever reason) it decides the cell I copied from wants to add the External Link.

To Replicate:
Open 2 Excel Documents

In Book1, Lets just have a simple formula, say in Cell A1 we have =SUM(B1:B3)+SUM(C1:C3) (My Usual ones are a lot more complicated, but examples need to be easy eh? )

Now I want to copy part of the formula to Book2, So in Book1 I click the cell, go to formula bar (or just the usual double click) and copy just 'SUM(C1:C3)'

Now go to Book2, Select A1, but instead of Just selecting Cell A1 to be able to edit it, in Book1 it updates Cell A1 to =SUM(B1:B3)+[Book2]Sheet1!$A$1
(And If you paste, it just tacks the copy onto the end of the formula, ignoring the fact you had Book2 as the Active window at all)

Always an Option, Checkmark, Enter, Esc, I was looking for a solution where I don't have to go through extra steps every time just to paste somewhere else.

On a good note though, I seem to have stumbled on the solution as I was looking through my other Google results;
With Office 365 (and I assume other Excels after my Office2k I had prior) Each Office program starts in the same 'Instance' (Task manager can confirm, each workbook opens under the same instance)
Further Googling and I found the method to open different instances (hold Alt when opening Excel )

And I now have Everything I ever wanted, I can copy between Books without deactivating the cells with the Checkmark/Enter/Esc.
AND Even my other gripe I tacked on the end of my OP, with the undo/redo problem, they're now separate!

Now to look into the regedit I spied on the same page to make it permanent without having to alt every time , I cant post links yet, so I will just say for anyone else with these issues to Google "Force Excel to open new Instance', its right in the M$ KB

Sorry for Taking up your Time on this Sambo kid, and thank you anyway for the super-fast responses.