in reply to Is an Excel spreadsheet open?

I'd ask Excel, through Win32::OLE. Most likely, iterating over Application.Workbooks or somesuch should yield all filenames of all open files.

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Re^2: Is an Excel spreadsheet open?
by merrymonk (Hermit) on Feb 10, 2010 at 16:50 UTC
    Thanks for that. I looked in the link and found enum for all objects and thought that may give what I wanted.
    Therefore I wrote some Perl (below) to test it.
    Unfortunately, the count was always zero no matter how many Excel files were open.
    Googling for Excel and Enum, I did find a site where someone was trying gain access to a file by requesting a handle to it.
    I thought that this may give what I wanted on the basis that it would only return a handle if the file was there but not opened.
    I can easily test if a file is there – if it is not it cannot be open.
    This is also in the Perl code below. Unfortunately this did not work either since it always returned a handle and if the file was not open, it opened Excel with a ‘blank’ screen.
    Can anyone give me a clue as to what to do next?
    use OLE;
use Win32::OLE::Const "Microsoft Excel";
use strict "vars";
my ($Count, $file, $ML);
$Count = Win32::OLE->EnumAllObjects(sub {
            my $Object = shift;
            my $Class = Win32::OLE->QueryObjectType($Object);
            printf "# Object=%s Class=%s\n", $Object, $Class;
        });
print "count <$Count>\n";
$file  = "C:\\abcd.xlsx";
$ML = Win32::OLE->GetObject($file)
or print "can't get a handle on '$file'";
print "$ML\n";

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      Again, why don't you ask Excel about its open files?

      # From memory, as I don't have Excel at hand currently
use Win32::OLE 'in';
my $excel = Win32::OLE->CreateObject('Excel.Application');

for my $wb (in($excel->{Workbooks})) {
    print $wb->{Filename},"\n";
};

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        Thanks again.
        I tried what you have most recently suggested as in the Perl below.
        When I run it with two spreasheets open, sadly I do not get anything printed out.
        It seems that the in does not find anything.
        Where will I find more about 'in'.
        use OLE;
use Win32::OLE::Const "Microsoft Excel";
use strict "vars";
use Win32::OLE 'in';
my $excel = Win32::OLE->CreateObject('Excel.Application');
for my $wb (in($excel->{Workbooks})) {
    print "in loop\n";
    print $wb->{Filename},"\n";
}

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