Well you can first try to move it, if it doesn't move, you can throw some messagebox response asking the user to close the Word file. You can also automatically close the word file, by using the Process class. Something like Process[] p = System.Diagnostics.GetProcessesByName("winword.exe"); for (int i = 0; i < p.length ;i++) { p[i].Close(); //or more brutally p[i].Kill(); }