pd.read_excel throws PermissionError if file is open in Excel : <p>Whenever I have the file open in Excel and run the code, I get the following error which is surprising because I thought read_excel should be a read only operation and would not require the file to be unlocked?</p>

<pre><code>    Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\Users\Public\a.py", line 53, in &lt;module&gt;
    main()
  File "C:\Users\Public\workspace\a.py", line 47, in main
    blend = plStream(rootDir);
  File "C:\Users\Public\workspace\a.py", line 20, in plStream
    df = pd.read_excel(fPath, sheetname="linear strategy", index_col="date", parse_dates=True)
  File "C:\Users\Public\Continuum\Anaconda35\lib\site-packages\pandas\io\excel.py", line 163, in read_excel
    io = ExcelFile(io, engine=engine)
  File "C:\Users\Public\Continuum\Anaconda35\lib\site-packages\pandas\io\excel.py", line 206, in __init__
    self.book = xlrd.open_workbook(io)
  File "C:\Users\Public\Continuum\Anaconda35\lib\site-packages\xlrd\__init__.py", line 394, in open_workbook
    f = open(filename, "rb")
PermissionError: [Errno 13] Permission denied: '&lt;Path to File&gt;'
</code></pre>
