Checkout/in Excel Workbooks from SharePoint with VBA

I have found several articles and past questions in SO that help with this, but I have added a twist. I found a way to map a network drive on my PC to the SharePoint folders. If I open a workbook that is currently checked out I get the popup to choose read-only/notify/cancel. But if the workbook is not currently checked out, there is nothing that allows me to check it out (when I open it through the drive mapping) to prevent others from making changes. Is there a way to do this with VBA?