Detect Excel or Open in a different way

I have a program that opens excel and a certain template through a shell statement, and then exports text form textboxes into certain cells of excell. Everything worked great in trial runs until I compiled it and put people on the program. It ends up that if Excel is already open then the shell opens a second Excel and the template, butinstead of writting to the template version of Excel it writes to the first version that was already open. Is there a way to detect if Excel is already open or maybe a diiferent way to open the template. I am fairly new to VB and don't know all of the tricks. If the code is needed let me know and I will provide it. I just thought it was probably too long for a forum.

Thanks for any help

MBStumped

You can use the GetObject function to get the active instance of Excel. If no instance is found, an error is returned.

Code:

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On Error Resume Next
Set xlApp = GetObject(, "Excel.Application")
If Err.Number <> 0 Then
    'Excel is not currently running
    Err.Clear  ' Clear Err object
Else
    'Excel is running
End If
On Error GoTo ErrHndlr  'Send future errors to your error handling routine

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Or, you can use the FindWindow API function.

Code:

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Declare Function FindWindow Lib "user32" Alias "FindWindowA" (ByVal lpClassName As String, ByVal lpWindowName As String) As Long


' If Excel is running this API call returns its handle.
hwnd = FindWindow("XLMAIN", 0)
If hwnd <> 0 Then    ' Excel is running.
    MsgBox "Please Close the Microsoft Excel Application Before Running This Program."
End If

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Hope this helps!