title: MATLAB: Prevent figures from being made active
body: <p>I have a rather large routine which will can run for a couple of hours. Here and there it creates a figure, plots something to it and saves that Figure. </p>
  
  <p>As I have only one PC, I would like to continue to work with that machine. The problem is that whenever a new figure is made, MATLAB becomes the active application again. 
  Is there any way to tell MATLAB or Windows that MATLAB should not be allowed to set itself to active?</p>
  
  <p>I saw that one possibility is to run a MATLAB script totally in the background (<a href="http://www.mathworks.com/support/solutions/en/data/1-6JCIN2/index.html?product=ML&amp;solution=1-6JCIN2" rel="nofollow">like that</a>). But that is a little bit too unsupervised, as I would like to be able to switch to the MATLAB window and check the output to the command window.</p>
  
  <p>Any ideas? If there is a general solution for Windows that prevents that other Applications to become active would also be cool!</p>