Powershell select entire row with already opened excel worksheet - excel

Question

I'm writing a little GUI to ease working on some excel documents. It has a button that starts this function to open excel file and select required row.
Function open_bible_file
{
$Excel = New-Object -ComObject excel.application
$Excel.WindowState= "xlMaximized"
$Excel.visible = $true
$WorkBook = $Excel.Workbooks.Open($SCOMBibleFile)
$Worksheet = $Workbook.WorkSheets.item("(1) Alerts")
$worksheet.activate()
$Range = $Worksheet.Cells.Item($excelrow,1).EntireRow
[void]$Range.Select()
}
}
It opens the file and selects the row as it should. But when I use this button again it just opens excel one more time and again selects another row. When I've tried to do another button to just select rows It does not know anything about already opened worksheets. How can I get around it?

Answer 1

The code should check if Excel is already running and if so, if the workbook (file $SCOMBibleFile) is present. If that is the case, re-activate Excel, otherwise start a new instance.
This should work:
function open_bible_file {
[CmdletBinding()]
Param(
[Parameter(Mandatory = $true, Position = 0)]
[string]$Path,
[Parameter(Mandatory = $false, Position = 1)]
[int]$RowToSelect = 1
)
$WorkBook = $null
# check if Excel is already open
try {
# Note: this only gets the excel instances that were started
# by the same user that runs this powershell function.
$Excel = [Runtime.Interopservices.Marshal]::GetActiveObject('Excel.Application')
# test if the $Path workbook is present in this Excel instance
foreach ($wb in $Excel.Workbooks) {
if ($wb.FullName -match [regex]::Escape($Path)) {
$WorkBook = $wb
break
}
}
}
catch {
# Excel wasn't opened yet, create a new instance
$Excel = New-Object -ComObject Excel.Application
}
if (!($Excel)) { Write-Error "Error opening Excel"; return }
if (!($WorkBook)) {
$WorkBook = $Excel.Workbooks.Open($Path)
}
# see https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/vba/api/excel.xlwindowstate
$xlMaximized = -4137
$Excel.Visible = $true
$Excel.WindowState = $xlMaximized
$Excel.ActiveWindow.Activate()
$Worksheet = $Workbook.WorkSheets.item("(1) Alerts")
$worksheet.activate()
$Range = $Worksheet.Cells.Item($RowToSelect, 1).EntireRow
[void]$Range.Select()
}
$SCOMBibleFile = '<PATH TO YOUR .xlsx FILE>'
open_bible_file -Path $SCOMBibleFile -RowToSelect 3
As you can see, I have changed the open_bible_file function to take parameters. The first (-Path) is where you give it the filename to open. The second (-RowToSelect) is the row number you want selected.
Hope this helps