Read open excel file in R - r

Question

is there a way to read an open excel file into R?
When an excel file is open in Excel, Excel puts a lock on the file, such as the reading method in R cannot access the file.
Can you circumvent this lock?
Thanks
Edit: this occurs under windows with original excel.

Answer 1

I too do not have problem opening xlsx files that are already open in excel, but if you do i have a workaround that might work:
path_to_xlsx <- "C:/Some/Path/to/test.xlsx"
temp <- tempdir()
file.copy(path_to_xlsx, to = paste0(temp, "/test.xlsx"))
df <- openxlsx::read.xlsx(paste0(temp, "/test.xlsx"))
This copies the file (Which should not be blocked) to a temporary directory, and then loads the file from there. Again, i'm not sure if this is needed, as i do not have the problem you have.

Answer 2

You could try something like this using the ps package. I've used it on Windows and Mac to read from files that I had downloaded from some web resource and opened in Excel with openxlsx2, but it should work with other packages or programs too.
# get the path to the open file via the ps package
library(ps)
p <- ps()
# get the pid for the current program, in my case Excel on Mac
ppid <- p$pid[grepl("Excel", p$name)]
# get the list of open files for that program
pfiles <- ps_open_files(ps_handle(ppid))
pfile <- pfiles[grepl(".xlsx", pfiles$path),]
# return the path to the file
sel <- grepl("^(.|[^~].*)\\.xlsx", basename(pfile$path))
path <- pfile$path[sel]

Answer 3

What do you mean by "the reading method in R", and by "cannot access the file" (i.e. what code are you using and what error message do you get exactly)? I'm successfully importing Excel files that are currently open, with something like:
dat <- readxl::read_excel("PATH/TO/FILE.xlsx")
If the file is being edited in Excel, R imports the last saved version.
EDIT: I've now tried it on both Linux and Windows and it still works, at least with version 1.3.1 of 'readxl'.