Maximize Excel Across All Monitors

Category: General VBA | [Item URL]

If you've ever worked on a computer that has more than one monitor attached, you're probably hooked. It's great for VBA developers, because they can have Excel displayed on one monitor, and the VBA Editor displayed on another monitor.

In some cases, you might want Excel's window to display across all monitors, to maximize the amount of data that you can see. When you maximize Excel's window, it fills only the current monitor. To display Excel across multiple monitors, you must do it manually:

1. Make sure that the Excel window is not maximized.
2. Drag Excel's window to the upper left corner of the first monitor
3. Drag its left and bottom borders to fill all of your virtual screens.

Here's Excel in a 3200 x 1200 window:

Here's a simple macro that eliminates the manual work and causes Excel's window to display across all monitors:

Private Const SM_CXVIRTUALSCREEN = 78
Private Const SM_CYVIRTUALSCREEN = 79

Private Declare Function GetSystemMetrics Lib "user32" ( _
ByVal nIndex As Long) As Long

Sub FillVirtualScreen()
    With Application
        .WindowState = xlNormal
        .Left = 0
        .Top = 0
        .Width = GetSystemMetrics(SM_CXVIRTUALSCREEN)
        .Height = GetSystemMetrics(SM_CYVIRTUALSCREEN)
    End With
End Sub

Note that the Excel window is not really maximized. In other words, you can drag the title bar to a different position. I don't know of any way to truly maximize Excel across multiple monitors.