Excel.exe Process Keeps On Running If Visible False After Any Error

Usually I use the following code to open an excel workbook in the background: import xlwings as xw app = xw.App(visible=False) wb = xw.Book(filename) sheet = wb.sheets['sheet1']

Solution 1:

I found this code snippet here. Using this psutil library it gets all the processes you have running, checks if a string is in the process (ie. Adobe, EXCEL) and kills those processes. This worked well using Python 3 and Windows 10 to kill Excel sessions that continued to run in the background after I had opened and "closed" them with Win32com.

import psutil

defmain():
    '''Process kill function'''for proc in psutil.process_iter():
        # check whether the process name matches# print(proc.name())ifany(procstr in proc.name() for procstr in\
            ['Adobe', 'EXCEL']):
            print(f'Killing {proc.name()}')
            proc.kill()


if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()

Solution 2:

Preferred solution xlwings added a solution in v0.24.3 to this problem: [Enhancement] xlwings.App() can now be used as context manager, making sure that there are no zombie processes left over on Windows, even if you use a hidden instance and your code fails. It is therefore recommended to use it whenever you can, like so:

import xlwings as xw
with xw.App(visible=False) as app:
    wb = xw.Book("test.xlsx")
    sheet = wb.sheets['sheet1']
    # To evoke an error, I trytocall an non-exisiting sheet here.
    nonexistent_sheet["A1"]

The with-line prevents that a EXCEL.EXE process stays open in windows task manager, even if you have an error in the code.

Solution before v24.0.3 Less elegant: Errors are caught by the except block, which means your main purpose of the script should be written in the try block.

import xlwings as xw
import traceback

app = xw.App(visible=False)
wb = xw.Book("test.xlsx")
sheet = wb.sheets['sheet1']

# Do what you want here. To evoke an error, I try to call an non-exisiting sheet here.try:
    not_existing_sheet["A1"]

# Sources for except block: https://stackoverflow.com/a/31609619/13968392 and https://stackoverflow.com/a/54396161/13968392except BaseException:
    print(traceback.print_exc())
    app.quit()