topic RE: MS Excel VBO Attach action failure in Product Forum

MS Excel VBO Attach action failure

HongJooChoi — Fri, 29 Jul 2022 09:32:00 GMT

Hi, Community.

I'm testing with the MS Excel VBO - extended to Attach to the Excel instance that's already up and running.
It seems the Attach action of the MS Excel VBO is not working for the Excel invoked by the 3rd-party application or manually.

Did I miss something in this test? or
Can anyone suggest the way to attach the existing instance of EXCEL that's invoked by the 3rd-party application?

1. the excel file is invoked firstly and one instance of EXCEL.exe comes up and running.
2. Try to attach the EXCEL instance using the Excel VBO as below:

3. It's observed that the Attach action invokes another instance of EXCEL.exe separately as shown below and thereby fail to attach to the first instance.

Best regards

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HongJoo Choi
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RE: MS Excel VBO Attach action failure

shashank.kumar280 — Fri, 29 Jul 2022 11:14:00 GMT

Hi HongJoo,

Do you know the file type of the file that is launched by the third party application. It would be worth checking if the behavior is the same if you launch the Excel manually first instead of the third party application.

I had a similar issue once in the past when the file type was *.xls instead of *.xlsx. But haven't tried this again recently with the latest VBO.

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Shashank Kumar
DX Integrations Partner Consultant
Blue Prism
Singapore
+6581326707
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RE: MS Excel VBO Attach action failure

RonanConsidine — Fri, 29 Jul 2022 13:58:00 GMT

Hello HongJoo,

Yes as you guessed the error is down to the process being unable to attach to the open excel as there are 2 instance that you can see in your task manager. There is a way round this.

1. Are you able to save the excel spreadsheet and then open it again using blueprism? Are you able to save it and then open it again? The steps would look like

Close all instances > Create Instance > Open Workbook (using the full filepath as name) > Get worksheet as collection (preferred choice)

Hope this helps.

Sadly Attach and Attach to workbook both create new instances so these aren't viable is the excel is already open.

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Ronan Considine
Senior Business Analyst
Blue Prism
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