Powershell COM Object Disposal

I run into a strange issue with one of my Powershell scripts the other day, I was using an Excel COM object and I had an Excel process even after calling the objects Quit() function.

All the script was doing was to open an Excel xlsx file and save it as csv file. I could use the Get-Process and Stop-Process cmdlets be I would like to be able to schedule the script to run and not be afraid that it would kill any other Excel processes running at the same time.

After a few searches I found out that I could release the COM object with the following command:

[System.Runtime.Interopservices.Marshal]::ReleaseComObject($excel)

Here we are releasing the COM object excel using the Interopservices. Before doing this, make sure that you have saved your work done using the COM object.

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