Excel Task-bar Buttons Issue

This post uses Office 2010 x64 on Windows 10 x64.

We need to set 'Combine task-bar buttons' to 'Never', in order to avoid the interruption of normal task-bar buttons combination.

1. Let's create 2 xlsx files on desktop, with the name

『工作簿1.xlsx』and『工作簿2.xlsx』(worksheet1.xlsx and worksheet2.xlsx).

1. Open 『工作簿1.xlsx』and『工作簿2.xlsx』 in order, normally 2 buttons will show

on task-bar:

1. Close and reopen 『工作簿2.xlsx』to check if there's still 2 buttons on

task-bar, repeat this step until there's only one button as the following:

The possible solutions are generally Changing the way to open xlsx or disable dde, we've tested these solutions but without luck. Maybe these solutions are broken, at least in our environment, so we're not going to discuss these solutions here, you can try these ways if solutions below do not work either.

We could launch a new excel instance, and drag 『工作簿2.xlsx』 to it, in this way, there must be 2 buttons, but possibly one with 2 spreadsheets, one with no spreadsheet:

We might get this idea: what if we restart the task-bar as it is a task-bar button issue? As we know, explorer.exe must be restarted if we want to restart task-bar. The task-bar looks like this after we restart the task-bar:

There're 3 buttons, representing excel, 『工作簿1.xlsx』and 『工作簿2.xlsx』, clicking either one of the buttons will leave us 2 buttons for the 2 spreadsheets:

We could infer that buttons for spreadsheets actually exists, but do not show for some reason we don't know, restarting explorer could show the buttons again. We could then create a re-explorer.cmd file on desktop with the following content:

:: shutdown explorer
taskkill /f /im explorer.exe
:: launch explorer
start explorer.exe

Run this batch file when this issue occurs, then the buttons show again. The batch file could also be downloaded here.