Powershell interact with open Excel

Question

To interact with excel in Powershell it is common to start a new excel as follows:

$x = New-Object -comobject Excel.Application

Instead of that I have an open Excel process already. (I get it as follows)

$excelprocess = Get-Process | Where-Object {$_.name -eq "excel"} | Sort-Object -Property "Starttime" -descending | Select-Object -First 1

Is there a way to interact with this specific excel process over PS?

Keith Hill · Accepted Answer · 2010-05-13 04:25:15Z

4

You want to use the Marshal.GetActiveObject method e.g.:

$xl = [Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal]::GetActiveObject('Excel.Application')
$xl.Quit()

answered May 12, 2010 at 15:26

Keith Hill

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