How to manage already opened Excel by User XY

Dear UiPath Community,

this is my first post and also I’ve already been looking through Forums, but wasn’t able to find a solution. I found quite a few similar cases, but never the solution I was looking for. Thus my question to brainstorm with you guys…

How would you setup a robot with write range in an excel sheet, which will be executed/triggered through Orchestrator every hour, that can potentially be already opened through a User?

Solutions we thought about, but are not really happy with:

  • Put the Excel Appl. Scope into a Try Catch (will keep trying until User closes the file…)
  • Timeout / Delay and Retry later - maybe 10 minutes (if a user forgets to close a file it will fail for the whole day)
  • exit workflow, log the information and write the range elsewhere (conditional) and fix / merge later
  • create a copy of the excel sheet and continue there (might need to merge the user input afterwards)

What do you guys think?

Any help and ideas are much appreciated.

Thanks in advanced.

  • Adrian

Hi @iamNairda,
Welcome to the Community!
How about using Kill Process activity and just close excel on the computer and then work with the rest part of the process?

Thanks for your reply and welcome. Well the kill process activity will only work for my computer / vbox. If the file is on a sharepoint site and opened in an explorer through another user, I wouldn’t be able to do that.

From personel experience we found using this to be the best method for us :slight_smile:

Use vb to check if Excel file is writeable. If yes proceed - if no: robot waits And tries again. Max timeout is 15 minuttes and then robot Will e-mail robot owner with error deskription and terminale proccess IF Excel is nescessary for that process to be completed.

Hope it makes sense - typing from mobile

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Yeah, it does make sense and it’s what we’re most likly will be doing as well. Even if it’s not entirely satisfying relying on a Human to inform another Human to close the .xlsx file… Thanks nonetheless for sharing what method worked best for you… if there’s anyone with a better idea, I am of course still open to hear it :slight_smile:

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