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KarlinOz
Advocate III
Advocate III

power bi unable to open document .pbix is already opne in power bi desktop or another program

Hi people,

I had my Power BI project open in Power BI Desktop when a windows update did an uncommanded restart without warning. I was in the process of uploading my project to the service.

 

When the machine restarted and I tried to open the file I get an error box with the title:

Unable to open document

and the message:

The file O:\Management\ProjectAnalysis.pbix is already open in Power BI Desktop or another program

 

How does PBI lock files? I looked in the source folder and there is no temp file there. I have rebooted the machine again but I am still unable to open the file. Even with the machine switched off and trying to open the file from another machine yeilds the same response on that machine. I copied the file and can open the copy fine to the structure is intact. The obvious solution is to then delete the original and rename the the copy to the original however Windows will not allow me to delete it saying it is in use by another user. 

 

Does anyone have any ideas as to how I can either find out what process is using it or delete it?

 

The file is stored on a network drive

Power BI Version: 2.40.4554.463 64-bit (October 2016)

 

Cheers,

Karl

1 ACCEPTED SOLUTION

 Thanks for the suggestion @Greg_Deckler however when the file is locked you can't do anything with it including changing the extension as far as I am aware. However the problem seems to have self resolved in that this morning after leaving things overnight I have managed to delete the file without any special intervention. Thanks again for your response.

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9 REPLIES 9
John4Roberta
Helper II
Helper II
MarcioL
Helper I
Helper I

It happens to me when I try to save the file. It says it cant because is open in other program.

 

Did anyone come into a solution for this problem? can't keep giving different names to the file everytime I want to save it

Fcoatis
Post Patron
Post Patron

This is constantly happenning to me. I cant keep sending different folder links to my boss. Is there an explanation for this behavior?

 

Thanks in advance

Hi I am having this problem too. It is pretty frustrating. I had my IT team run command prompt as admin, and they tried to delete it there but it would not work. More or less the same error about the document being in use by another application. 

 

We will probably have to create a new network folder, copy over everything except the locked version. Copy over a functional copy of the pbix file, and then try to rename the old folder (if we can?) to hide it.

 

Any real breakthroughs out there? 

Greg_Deckler
Super User
Super User

You could try to change the file extension from .pbix to .zip and try to look for a lock file in there. If you find it, delete it and then change the extension back.


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 Thanks for the suggestion @Greg_Deckler however when the file is locked you can't do anything with it including changing the extension as far as I am aware. However the problem seems to have self resolved in that this morning after leaving things overnight I have managed to delete the file without any special intervention. Thanks again for your response.

This issue has occured again - the host machine rebooted with the project open and now the file is locked again. I can neither open delete nor modify it. Whenever I try and do any of those I get the windows message "This action can't be completed because the file is open in another program. Close the file and try again" But the file is not opened. The host machine has restarted and I can't open the file. I will wait until tomorrow morning and see if it is magically available for opening then.

Only Copy the .pibx file to another folder and double click to open it. It will be open successfuly.

 

Thanks @Arif, I had already done that to verify the file was ok and not corrupted. What I then needed to do was to delete the original file and move the copy back into its location. But something was locking the file preventing me from deleting or renaming the original. Next time it happens I'll try using the command prompt to try deleting the original file or use the NAS OS to try deleting it. The file is on a NAS device.

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