vbscript - Close Open Excel Instance

Question

Could someone please let me know if the following simple VBScript is correct? It is supposed to close Excel after other processes have run (and left Excel open), but it doesn't work.

Set MyApp = CreateObject("Excel.Application")
MyApp.Quit

Answer 1

CreateObject creates a new object. If I understand your question correctly you want to attach to already running (orphaned) Excel processes to terminate them. You can do that with GetObject:

On Error Resume Next
Do
  Set xl = GetObject(, "Excel.Application")
  status = Err.Number
  If status = 0 Then
    For Each wb in xl.Workbooks
      wb.Close False  'discard changes in open workbooks
    Next
    xl.Quit
  ElseIf status <> 429 Then
    WScript.Echo Err.Number & ": " & Err.Description
    WScript.Quit 1
  End If
Until status = 429
On Error Goto 0

Note that this will try to close all running Excel instances, discarding all changes in open workbooks. If you want it to save changes in open workbooks change the argument of the Close method to True. If you have Excel instances you want to keep running, you need to add code to exclude them from being closed.

Note also, that this will not forcibly terminate unresponsive instances. You'd need to kill the process for that:

Set wmi = GetObject("winmgmts://root/cimv2")
For Each xl In wmi.ExecQuery("SELECT * FROM Win32_Process WHERE Name = 'excel.exe'")
  xl.Terminate
Next