Determine if an application is available using VBA in Microsoft Excel

To find out the status of any particular application available or running in Microsoft Excel, take a look at this article. We will use VBA code to check to return “True”, if the application is available or running or return and “False” if not.

Question: I would like to have a macro to identify in background whether the specific application is running or available/installed in the system.

To identify the Outlook application is running or available; we need to follow the below steps to launch VB editor:

Click on Developer tab
From Code group select Visual Basic

Click on Insert then Module

This will create new module
Enter the following code in the Module

Function ApplicationIsRunning(ApplicationClassName As String) As Boolean
' returns True if the application is running
' example: If Not ApplicationIsRunning("Outlook.Application") Then Exit Sub
Dim AnyApp As Object
  On Error Resume Next
  Set AnyApp = GetObject(, ApplicationClassName)
  ApplicationIsRunning = Not AnyApp Is Nothing
  Set AnyApp = Nothing
  On Error GoTo 0
End Function

Function ApplicationIsAvailable(ApplicationClassName As String) As Boolean
' returns True if the application is available
' example: If Not ApplicationIsAvailable("Outlook.Application") Then Exit Sub
Dim AnyApp As Object
  On Error Resume Next
  Set AnyApp = CreateObject(ApplicationClassName)
  ApplicationIsAvailable = Not AnyApp Is Nothing
  Set AnyApp = Nothing
  On Error GoTo 0
End Function

In any cell you need to enter formula as follows to check if Outlook Application is installed on the pc
=ApplicationIsAvailable("Outlook.Application")

To determine if Outlook Application is currently running or not; in any cell enter the formula as =ApplicationIsRunning("Outlook.Application")

Conclusion: This way we can check the status of specific application is install & whether it’s running or not.

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Paul
October 15, 2013 at 5:27 pm

Thanks for the post. I learned how to determine if a specific MSO App is running, but now I would like to determine if a specific third party program like "SAP" or "Primavera 6" or "AUTOCAD" etc is available to run.

Background: A list box will be generated based on the available programs on the users PC. The user will be able to pick from this list which programs (as well as webpages, files and or folders) they want opened when Excel starts... any help would be appreciated + thanks!

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