How can I prevent the screen flashing grey at every workbook open in a macro suite – Photoshop

I am not sure if there is any easy way to prevent the problem you are describing – I am guessing you are seeing the various workbooks being opened on top of the current one, although I can’t recall having experienced anything quite similar despite at times working with quite big workbooks and macros.

I wrote the macros you can see below in an attempt to replicate your problem, but didn’t see it – of course there is a lot less work done in the various workbooks in my example than in what you describe, so maybe some of the problems come from that. I tried running the macro both with and without the settings in the bottommost macros turned off, but nothing seemed to replicate your problem.

Option Explicit

Sub test1()
    Call speedup

    Call test2

    Call slowdown
End Sub

Private Sub test2()
    Dim i As Long

    For i = 1 To 4
        With Workbooks.Open(Filename:="C:UsersEirikDaudeDesktopTestTest" & CStr(i) & ".xlsx", ReadOnly:=True)
            Application.Wait (Now + TimeValue("0:00:03"))
            Debug.Print .FullName
            .Close
        End With
    Next i
End Sub

Private Sub speedup()
    Application.EnableEvents = False
    Application.ScreenUpdating = False
    Application.DisplayStatusBar = False
    Application.EnableAnimations = False
    Application.Calculation = xlCalculationManual
End Sub

Private Sub slowdown()
    Application.EnableEvents = True
    Application.ScreenUpdating = True
    Application.DisplayStatusBar = True
    Application.EnableAnimations = True
    Application.Calculation = xlCalculationAutomatic
End Sub

As you can see, I am turning off some Excel settings, similarly to what you found when you googled. Contrary to the suggestions in the comments on your question, I recommend only doing this in the main sub you are calling the others from, in order to keep track of which ones are turned off and which ones are turned on. Of course you may need to e.g. calculate some formulas in your sheet in the middle of your code execution, but if you do I would recommend doing so “manually” using Application.Calculate or Application.CalculateFull. I’ll leave it as an exercise to you to figure out what the different settings do, it should be easy enough to google them.

As you may have guessed already, I think the best recipe for minimizing the amount of grey screen you see is making your code more efficient. Playing around with the settings shown in my macros could be a start, otherwise there are a lot of sites out there making recommendations on how to achieve this (I like this one, for instance). From what you wrote, doing something like wb1.worksheet.range.value = wb2.worksheet.range.value instead of copying the same might be a good place to start. Of course, without knowing exactly what your macro looks like, or what it does, it is hard to offer much concrete advice. I hope this at least could be of some help, I’m sorry I couldn’t be more helpful with the concrete problem you are facing.