Python and Excel

[ian castleden]

From time to time I see requests for some sort of python MS Excel
interface/software.
I have written just such software 100% python (works with Jython too! at
least it did a year ago).
It was once based (shamelessly) on the the Perl equivalent but now has gone
its own way.
It has been used in anger (i.e. people once payed me money to use it :-) and
includes both generation
and scaning of Excel files. There's even some documentation for the
generation side of the software!

I haven't touched it in a year (my brain exploded and I decided to move to
France to learn French) but if
someone (anyone!) expresses an interest, I can dust it off and offer it up
no questions asked. Just need to know how.

Cheers

Ian Castleden

PS any jobs for unemployed anglo-saxon Python programmers in France?

[Simon John]

Hmm, sounds interesting, I've always resorted to using CSV (or even
HTML!) when exporting to Excel.

As far as how to open it up, have a look at creating a project on
www.sourceforge.net or just zip it up and bung it on your own website
if you have one. I've got the feeling there are also Python-specific
repositories too. Or you could just paste the code into a blog or
something free like Livejournal.

Good luck on the France thing, that's where my folks live now (I'm an
Englishman who retreated to the US!)

[howardrh]

Please consider this reply as one vote for posting your python Excel
interface/software on the Vaults of Pamassus Web Site. Located at
http://www.vex.net/parnassus/

[Charlie Taylor]

If it helps, I started a similar project a few years ago on SourceForge when I
was just learning python called python2xlw. I haven't supported it for quite
a while, however, I still use it a lot in my own work.

I needed to create Excel files with scatter charts in them for a web interface
so I went through the excercise of disassembling the BIFF codes of the older
XLW format of excel and creating a byte stream representation of the
spreadsheet that could be saved to file or sent directly to the web user as an
excel application in there browser.

The newer XLS format is a bit more complex and I didn't have enough
documentation to create the charts I needed directly from python in the newer
XLS format. (the current version of excel still understands XLW, however, so
you're just a "SAVE AS" away from XLS.)

As I think was mentioned in another post, you can create charts etc. using the
COM interface for a client-type application, however, my goal was to create
them on-the-fly directly from the web server without launching a server-side
excel application.

There is a nice Perl project called Spreadsheet::WriteExcel that John McNamara
created that was very helpful to me at that time, however, it only created the
worksheets, not charts.