Fun and Extremely Useful Project for a Script Lover

Question

I am thinking about dabbling with PowerShell scripting because I and other business users could really use a script that intercepts commands to open .xlsx files and does the following:
1) Checks to see if an excel file of the same name is already open in an instance of Excel.  If not, then the file is passed on to Excel/a running instance of Excel to open as normal.
2) If so, a dialog will say "A file of this name is already open in Excel.  Would you like to create a temporary copy of this file with a slightly different name and open it?"
3) Choosing Yes to the above will create a copy of the file with a different name in the user's temporary directory and then open it in the already active Excel instance, thus somewhat defeating the dreaded "Sorry, Excel can't open two workbooks with
the same name at the same time."
Most of the time, people trying to open two instances of a workbook of the same name are doing so to compare them, so making one be a temporary copy is not harmful but rather extremely helpful.  I would guess that most of the time, users receiving this
stop message are fully aware of what they're trying to do and end up immediately making a copy of one of the two files in question with an altered name so that they can go about their business of trying to compare the contents in Excel :).

Answer 1

I'm not a scripter today, but currently code in R, so this doesn't feel out of range for me to try.  My fundamental question at this stage is:  As I've described the workflow above, is PowerShell (or PowerShell + some registry key editing)
the best choice/capable of the interactions I've described?  These are essentially:
1) Intercept any user actions looking to open an Excel file (from windows explorer, from the command line, from the run box, etc.)
2) Examine the call to open the file.
3) Find and query running instances of Excel in order to compare the filenames of what is already opened in Excel to the information from (2).
4) Display a GUI interaction choice to the user to decide how to proceed.
Posts like these two made me think this was a useful forum to post the idea and garner some feedback (The site won't let me hyperlink these titles, but search for them on the Scripting Guy's Blog):
Can I open a file dialog box with Windows PowerShell?
PowerShell and Excel:  Fast, Safe, and Reliable
The examples above also lend me to believe that if it turns out this is extremely simple with just about 10 lines, someone might just provide code which does it.
As an aside, it's not the hardest problem to solve now:  before opening the 2nd file that you already know is a name collision, I quickly hit Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V to make a copy right there in the same directory, and open it instead.  However,
this also requires you to remember you've done this and go back to delete that file before moving on.  In my work, it may be hours before I'm done with the comparison work and it is hard to recall that you have some file cleanup to do afterwards, thus
the idea of a script that would already put the copy in a temp directory for you and also not require you beforehand to remember whether the filename of what you're about to open is identical to one already opened (an enhancement might be to also check whether
the path is the same, i.e., you've made a mistake and are opening a "truly already open" file.)
Thanks in advance if you or any readers have some ideas!