How to Get an Excel VSTO Workbook Closed Event

In an Excel add-in the Application class exposes several workbook related events. The workbook open event is one of them, however its direct counterpart, workbook closed event, is missing.

We could resort to the WorkbookBeforeClose event, but for a modified workbook Excel will allow the user to save/discard changes or cancel the close operation. Since this logic occurs after the before close event you have no guarantees that the workbook will in fact be closed.

Not wanting to override the native save changes dialog I ended up implementing a monitor that when associated to the Excel application can correctly trigger workbook closed events.

You can download the monitor implementation from GitHub and use it like illustrated in the following snippet:

private WorkbookClosedMonitor Monitor { get; set; }

private void ThisAddIn_Startup(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
    this.Monitor = new WorkbookClosedMonitor(this.Application);

    this.Monitor.WorkbookClosed += Monitor_WorkbookClosed;
}

void Monitor_WorkbookClosed(object sender, WorkbookClosedEventArgs e)
{
    Debug.WriteLine(String.Format("Closed workbook: {0}", e.Name));
}

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