OneDrive sync issues whenever a bot changes an excel file

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Hi,

Getting a problem that I’m currently out of ideas on how to fix.

A bot needs to add rows to a ‘live’ excel file that the business also uses. The way the business keeps it synchronised is by using onedrive/sharepoint, allowing multiple people to have the file open and make changes/add rows. The bot also needs to do this.

The problem is that when the bot uses the modern excel activities to read the file and simply add rows to the bottom, OneDrive then reports a synchronisation problem and the bot’s version of the file starts to diverge from the real one until someone manually opens both of them and remerges them. This problem doesn’t occur every time, but it does happen often enough that it causes trouble.

If a user opens the file on the bot machine and does the exact same thing, this never happens, yet whenever the bot does it, it runs the risk of occurring. I have tried to change the way the bot interacts with the file to use “Application” rather than “Automation”, and to show the excel window, including a save activity at the end. I thought this had fixed it, and while it seems to have improved, it can still occur.

Has anyone had success with onedrive and bots working together? Using the O365 integration is not an option here as that would be a massive rebuild of several components, and I am not sure it would solve the problem anyway. Another option considered was to pause one drive syncing while the bot was using the file, but that hasn’t always worked in the past either, and could miss live changes from one of the users. All I can think to do is increase the delays on the excel activities and hope it is a timing thing at the moment.

Thanks