Can Word and Excel files stay open on Mac desktop at same time?

I open word and excel closes, I open Excel and word closes. I append the screen shots.



I am a new Mac user, and I never have this problem with a pc either.

MANY THANKS

Have you tried to move your document window over? It might just be that one document window is covering the other one.

I have - it's definitely not there. Same happens sometimes when I try to keep Firefox open with other windows.

It looks like you're using Spaces. In your top menu bar, see the little square icon with a number inside it? In the screenshot with Word, the number is 2; in the screenshot with Excel, the number is 3. That tells me that Word is opening in one Space and Excel is opening in another Space. Click on that square icon with the number inside it, then select "Open Spaces Preferences" from the menu. In the list of "Application Assignments", do you have Word and Excel set so that they're in a specific Space?

If you do, then what's happening is that when you launch Word, Excel, or Firefox, Leopard is switching your view to that Space. There are a couple of things that you can do:
1. If you don't like this behaviour at all, you could completely disable Spaces. Then everything will just open up all together at the same time. To disable Spaces, in the Spaces preferences, uncheck the box next to "Enable Spaces".
2. If you do like Spaces, but don't want to have Word always open in a specific Space, then you can remove it from the list of applications which have assigned Spaces. If you do this, then when you launch Word, it will just open in the Space that you're viewing at the time. To do this, in the Spaces preferences, select Word in the list of Application Assignments, then click the minus button below the list. Repeat this for any other applications that you don't want to open in a specific Space.
3. If you do like Spaces and mostly want Word to open in a specific Space, but sometimes want it to be in another Space, you can simply move Word to the Space that you want. Click on the Word title bar and drag it to the Space that you want.

If you want to learn more about using Spaces with Leopard, here's a great article from Apple that has lots of details about the best ways to use it:
http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1624

If you're sharing this Mac with someone else, and they've set it up this way, the easiest thing for you to do (or for the person who set up Spaces, since they might be more comfortable using the Mac) is to set up another user account for you. This way, they can have their Spaces set up the way that they like it, and you can have your account set up the way that you like it. For more information about using multiple user accounts on your Mac, here's an article from Apple with more details about it:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.ht...

Also, since you're using Spaces with Office 2008, you should make sure that you've got Office 2008 updated to the latest version (which is currently 12.1.19) and Leopard updated to the latest version (which is currently 10.5.7). There were some issues in Leopard which made Office 2008 and other Carbon apps not behave very well with Spaces, which have been greatly addressed in the latest version of Leopard.

Many thanks! Have disabled spaces, as I prefer the simpler solution