Weird problem with Macbook

Hi!

I recently upgraded to MacBook after being a PC guy for all my life. I got Black one with 2.4 GHz processor. I am pretty happy with the switch so far, though I haven;t got time to play with it as much as I would have liked. I am reading the threads here which are full of information for people like me who are new converts to Mac.

Anyhow, I have observed one problem two times recently.

Last night, I was surfing the web using Firefox (had 4 tabs open) and then opened excel. I worked on my excel file for a while and then went back to Firefox (didn't minimize the excel. just clicked on Firefox menu bar which was under the excel). Firefox came up, but after a while, when I went back to Excel, I couldn't see the excel sheet though I could see the menu bar for excel. I tried to open the file again, but got a message that file is already open and I will lose any changes if I open it again. No matter what I tried, minimizing firefox, clicking on excel icon, but still same problem. Finally, I quit excel, restarted it and everything worked fine.

Same thing happened couple of days ago, but then firefox wouldn't show up, though excel worked fine.

What could it be due to? I had updated the apple software yesterday and restarted yesterday itself, so the system was not on for a number of days like PC's which start giving trouble if you dont shut them down, so I dont think it is memory issue, though I might be wrong.

Please advice.

Thanks.

Did you try Command+tab to switch between the two? Windows also has this key command that lets you cycle through the applications that are open, I believe it's alt+tab.

No, I didn't try that, but did try Expose, but that didn't help either. May be next time if it happens (though I hope it doesn't), then I will try that. ANy other suggestions?

The excel menu system and the spread sheets open separately. On my apple keyboard F3 sorts it out for me... but you can set it up through Expose.