Launch Excel error in Power automate desktop

[Anonymous]

Whenever I run the flow which contains 'Launch Excel' action, I am getting the error saying that

'Failed to open Excel document '(Excel launching error.)'.

I updated my PAD to its latest version, still I am facing this issue.

Please suggest me a solution. Without resolving the issue, I cannot go ahead with the flow.

[Anonymous]

I hear you. I had exactly the same issue and spent countless hours on this. I found that closing it, opening excel and then reopening one drive restores the auto-sync. So onedrive is only down for ~5 seconds. Perhaps in your circumstance, this doesn't work :(. 

[MartinPedersenP]

I think that for now, the issue has been solved.

I have rolled OneDrive back to the deferred ring release(101.xxxx) and updated my office installation.

Somehow this has solved the issue, for now. I think that some of the "Files on demand" features that has been released in the production/early access rings are locking the files and somehow making it impossible for PAD to launch an excel instance opening it.

I have created a ticket with the Microsoft support team and we are monitoring the issue to see if it occours once a new deferred ring update is released.

[Cayshin]

I've still been affected by this issue, even after trying everyone else's solutions across the different posts about this issue; however, I finally came up with a simple Flow that solved it for me.

What I had noticed was that the file only fails to open on the first attempt, but any subsequent attempt it will open fine (but with the pop-up message "this file is already open, blah blah blah). So to get around that, I created an "on block error" loop that retries X amount of times. These are the steps and settings I used that finally worked.