Opening a workbook (or other Office doc) on a shared drive that another user has open

Question

Suppose a workbook exists on a shared network drive, and is open by User A. If User B attempts to open this file by double clicking it, he gets something like the following prompt:

If User B instead attempts to open the workbook programmatically (perhaps with an add-in) using:

Workbooks.Open("N:\path_to_workbook\workbook.xlsx")

what happens, exactly? Does this above prompt appear? If so, can it be suppressed with Application.DisplayAlerts = False ? If Workbooks.Open as shown above throws an exception in this case, do we need to try again using the ReadOnly argument, as:

Workbooks.Open("N:\path_to_workbook\workbook.xlsx", ReadOnly:=True)

I have read other posts (including this one ) that suggest that Workbooks.Open in the first code snippet succeeds and the workbook is opened read-only, although this is not perfectly clear.

Unfortunately, I don't have a test environment configured to replicate this scenario myself, which would otherwise be the obvious answer.

Answer 1

I tested on our network drive environment, and found the following. If the file is opened by User A and User B attempts to open the file programmatically using Workbooks.Open then the result will be a Read Only version of the file.

If you wish to control the opening of Read Only files than you may utilize the following code example to close it:

Sub Test()

Dim wb As Workbook

Set wb = Workbooks.Open("Path_To_Excel_File")
If wb.ReadOnly Then
    MsgBox "File already in use"
    wb.Close savechanges:=False
End If

End Sub