I cannot close Excel 2016 after executing a xlwings function

Question

when I execute a an Xlwings function I can save and close the workbook. But I cannot close Excel 2016 anymore. Is this a known issue? How can I fix this?

Answer 1

Here is how I got it to work:

import xlwings as xw
wbPath = [WorkbookPath]
wb = xw.Book(wbPath) 
app = xw.apps.active    
wb.save(wbPath)
#wb.close()

app.quit()

Note that I commented out the line wb.close(). You can skip this step and instead set the app = active Excel instance, save the workbook, and then quit the app.

Answer 2

I had a situation where app.quit() did not work. In this case I used app.kill() instead.

Answer 3

Just to build on mouwsy's answer, I now have this context manager:

class XwApp(xw.App):
    def __enter__(self, *args, **kwargs):
        return super(*args, **kwargs)
    def __exit__(self, *args):
        for book in self.books:
            try:
                book.close()
            except: pass
        self.kill()

which I use like so:

with XwApp(visible=False) as app:
    app.books.add()
    
    # or
    
    app.books.open('file.xlsx')
    
    # ...

and this seems reasonably clean exiting so far. (But pre-opened Excel windows can always mess things up.)

Answer 4

I know this is old but I was unable to find an answer that worked and figured out a solve. I was able to close the instance of Excel by accessing the api property in xlwings.

xl = xw.apps.active.api
xl.Quit()

xlwings is just a fancy wrapper around pywin32, you can directly access the pywin32 functions by implementing the api property.