PermissionError: [Errno 13] Permission denied: 'Abc.xlsx'

[Peter J. Holzer]

On 2022-02-11 18:20:19 -0500, Dennis Lee Bieber wrote:
> On Fri, 11 Feb 2022 20:37:57 +0100, "Peter J. Holzer" <hjp-python at hjp.at>
> declaimed the following:
> 
> >Interestingly, Excel did have the ability for multiple users editing the
> >same file at some time (maybe early 2000s? Way before Google docs or
                                              ^^^^^^^^^^
> >Office 365). It had to be explicitely enabled and it didn't work very
   ^^^^^^^^^^
> >reliably (at least not with Samba as file servers), so we never really
> >used it but it is clear that somebody at MS thought that users needed or
> >at least wanted that ability.
> 
> 	A quick Google does find mention of "shared workbooks":
> https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/troubleshoot/excel/use-shared-workbook

| To make changes to a shared workbook that was created in Microsoft Excel 97
| or a later version of Excel, you must use Excel 97 or a later version of Excel.

So apparently that ability was added in Excel 97.


> 	The preferred mode requires "Microsoft 365 subscription" and latest
> Office version:

Yes, these days you would use Office 365 for that kind of functionality,
but that didn't exist at that time (neither did cloud storage systems).

Network file systems like NFS or SMB did exist, though, and people
wanted (or at least MS thought they wanted) to collaborate on Excel
files. So Excel provided a way to do that.

That was sort of the point: That Excel was not *always* single-user.
There have been ways that multiple users could simultaneously edit the
same file for 25 years.


> 	However -- the key feature is that these are Excel-Excel(-Excel...)
> operations

I'm pretty sure that that worked entirely through the file system. So
the only thing stopping you from implementing it in a different program
was the lack of documentation (as was typical for MS in the 1990's).

But again, this wasn't my point. My point was that Excel files are
designed to be used only by a single process isn't true.

        hp

-- 
   _  | Peter J. Holzer    | Story must make more sense than reality.
|_|_) |                    |
| |   | hjp at hjp.at         |    -- Charles Stross, "Creative writing
__/   | http://www.hjp.at/ |       challenge!"
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