Accessing and Updating Excel sheet in use

How are people overcoming this issue? Currently for our automation we sync the SharePoint library and the automation access it like a LAN drive. The problem is when the robot does its work and there is a person on the spreadsheet making changes you get a merge error and creates a new file.

How is everybody else handling these situations where you need to do work on a sheet but it might be in use? So far users are pretty good with staying off the sheet but the issue comes up time to time.

I recommend you create seperate working directories for the robot or For all the files that the robot will use, the users should be allowed to download the output & upload the inputs. They should not be allowed to open the file and work on it on sharepoint online.

Regards,
Nithin