I have a series of Excel Workbooks that reside on a server. Through VBE I am working with different workbooks. Now I run the possibility that different users may try to access the same workbook at the same time. Is there a way to check for a workbook being busy before opening it so that I can prevent this problem? I'm already using Scripting.FileSystemObjects to check for the existence of folders and files, but I don't see any way to do what I want. Thanks for any help anyone can give.

Terry

There is probably a more elegant solution but you could try this...

Workbooks.Open "Name.xls", Notify:=False

This will prevent the file from opening if someone has it open already.

Elegant I don't need. I believe this coupled with an "on error" process should work just great.

Thanks!

Or you could just use an

IF statement to test to see if the file opened succesfully THEN
    carry out any actions on the file
ELSE
    do whatever alternative action if the file did not open
    (i.e. someone else was using it...)
End If

As it turns out you've effectively come up with the only solution to this problem.

There's a Microsoft KB article on this http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q138621/ which also provides a neat wrapper function to test for already open files. However, as previously stated its semantically the same as the already proposed solution.

Maccas