Flex :: Load A Local File Without Having To Ask The User To Browse To It First In An AIR Application?

I'm writing a small application for myself and instead of using a database I'd like to just use Excel to store the small amount of data I have on my local file system. I want to be able to load that data without having to use the typical FileReference browse() method as it would just be annoying to do every time I use the application.

The code below seems to find the file fine as the file.exists method below and most of the other attributes seem to be correct but the file.data is always null.I'm guessing this is a security issue and that's why I'm running into this problem but I thought I'd ask and see if there is in fact a way around this problem.

var file:File = new File(fullPath + "\" + currentFolder + ".txt");
if(file.exists) {
var byteArray:ByteArray = file.data;
}