How do you disable OS X (when you focus on a window) from auto-focusing on windows from the same (or similar) program on another screen

Question

Hi,
I have what is quickly becoming a major nuisance, I hope someone here knows more than me (hopefully about to change this behaviour..?).
Whenever I click on e.g. excel on one screen, the excel windows in the background on my other screen is automatically brough to the front, hiding the window I actually want to be able to see. And if I have no excel windows on that screen, it will automatically bring e.g. MS word to the front instead.
Does anyone know of a way to disable this extremely annoying behaviour? It seems silly to have to minimize every single window (yes, I have a lot open at any given time, and need to transfer data between several different programs) just to be able to look at windows from two different programs at the same time.
Cheers,
W

Answer 1

this is NOT how apps behave on a Windows PC. There, the different windows of any app focus independently.
Mmm, no, not really. All Windows apps run inside an application frame. Nothing for that app can exist outside the frame. Once you are in the frame of a given app, all of (example) Excel's open documents are also stuck inside the frame. Along with any palettes or other objects for that app. You can take it off full screen display like below, but each app, and everything associated with it is in its own frame.
I mention this to show that you can do the same thing on your Mac. Where you said:
I'm clicking/highlighting to the foreground (this also applies if I use alt+tab in Windows PC; you cycle through every single excel you have open,
The equivalent on the Mac is to press Command+` (same key as the tilde ~, which should be directly above the Tab key). So it's Command+Tab to switch between apps, and Command+` to rotate between open documents within an app.
So anyway, in the same manner you would arrange your Windows apps as shown above so you can see the contents of both apps, you simply arrange your Mac apps' documents the same way. Adjust the size of each open document as necessary so you can see the relevant information.
Just like if a person were going from Mac to Windows, it's "different". Folders, files and apps? All the same concept. Saving and deleting files? Pretty much the same. But if you're very used to one, the other seems odd until the need to think about "simple" steps that aren't performed quite the same way as the OS you're used to becomes habit, and it no longer seems odd anymore.