Counting instances of Excel - wrong result in O365

[ByteMarks]

Hi All,
I have an addin which update from a server but I only want to perform this the first time the user opens Excel.
So far I've achieved this by using this well known function to count the number of instances open.

In a scenario where there is One Instance containing One Workbook, containing One Worksheet:
It gives the expected result of 1 in earlier versions of Excel, but in Excel 365 32bit it returns 3

I guess this has something to do with Excel moving to SDI (?) but does of a better way to achieve this?

Please Login or Register  to view this content.

[rorya]

What do you actually want a count of? If it's the number of running Excel processes, you can use WMI which is simpler:

Please Login or Register  to view this content.

called with:

Please Login or Register  to view this content.

Your current version, due to SDI as you said, is counting the number of workbooks, including hidden/ and xlam/xla format add-ins.

[ByteMarks]

Hi,
I have an xlam addin which checks on the server to see if there is an updated version there. If there is it prompts the user to update. (there's also a separate check so that if they decline the update it doesn't occur again on the same day).
However I don't want this be uninstalling and resinstalling if (with MDI) multiple instances of Excel are running.

So this check usually fires the first time they open excel which with MDI would be one instance.

The problem I have was that this check wasn't firing in O365 as the instance count wasn't 1.

I tried your alternative but it's still giving me 2, even with a single workbook open, but of course the addin itself is loaded.

[rorya]

My version counts the number of Excel.exe processes running - it doesn't attempt to determine how many workbooks might be in each. If you see 2, then there are two Excel processes running.

[ByteMarks]

Yes I do a separate workbook count. It returns 1 now, so the other process must have been a rogue one.
Many thanks for your help.