Detect Excel or Open in a different way

[MBStumped]

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

[tclere]

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

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

Or, you can use the FindWindow API function.

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

Hope this helps!