My problem is rather simple : I have an Excel Sheet that does calculations and creates a graph based on the values of two cells in the sheet. I also have two lists of inputs in text files. I would like to loop through those text files, add the values to the excel sheet, refresh the sheet, and print the resulting graph to a pdf file or an excel file named something like 'input1 - input2.xlsx'.
My programming knowledge is limited, I am decent with Python and have looked into python libraries that work with excel such as openpyxl, however most of those don't seem to work for me for various reasons. Openpyxl deletes the graphs when opening an excel file; XlsxWriter can only write files, not read from them; and xlwings won't work for me.
Should I use python, which I'm familiar with, or would VBA work for this kind of problem? Have any of you ever done something of the sort?
Thanks in advance
As a more transitional approach to what m. wasowski wrote above, I'd suggest you do the following.
Install the pandas package, and see how easy it is to load a file using read_excel. Then, read 10 Minutes to Pandas, and manipulate the data.
You state that the Excel sheet is complex. In general, the more complex it is, this approach will eventually make it simpler. But you don't have to switch everything immediately. You can still do parts in Excel and parts in pandas.
I think you should consider win32Com for excel operation in python instead of Openpyxl,XlsxWriter.
you can read/write excel, create chart and format excel file using win32com without any limitation.
And creating chart you can consider matplotlib, in that after creating chart you can save it in pdf file also.
Related
We have a rather complicated Excel based VBA Tool that shall be replaced by a proper Database and Python based application step by step.
There will be time of the transition between were the not yet completely ready Python tool and the already existing VBA solution will coexist.
To allow interoperability the Python tool must be able to export the database values into the Excel VBA Tool keeping it intact. Meaning that not only all VBA codes have to work as expected but also Shapes, Special Formats etc, Checkboxes etc. have to work after the export.
Currently a simple:
from openpyxl import load_workbook
wb = load_workbook(r'Tool.xlsm', keep_vba=True)
# Write some data i.e. (not required to destroy the file)
wb["SomeSheet!SomeCell"] = "SomeValue"
wb.save(r"Tool_filled.xlsm")
will destroy the file, i.e. shapes won't work, checkboxes neither. (The resulting file is only 5 MB from originally 8 MB, showing that something went quite wrong).
Is there a way to only modify only the data of an ExcelSheet keeping everything else intact/untouched?
As far I know an Excel Sheet are only zipped .xml files. So it should be possible to edit only the related sheets? Correct?
Is there a more comfortable way as writing everything from scratch to only modify the data of an existing Excel file?
Note: The solution has to work in Linux, so simple remote Excel calls are not an option.
I have a very complex Excel tool to analyze data. I want to enter raw-data into a separate sheet in this file using python. I tried this with openpyxl, but this was destroying my other sheets and diagrams because of unsupported functionalities of openpyxl. When saving, openpyxl is reprocessing all the datasheets.
Is there a way to just combine two excel files without this reprocessing? Or another tool allowing for opening a sheet and writing into this without the above mentioned problems? So basically just blindly taking a datasheet and copy that to another file without any changes in other datasheets and compatibility problems.
I have built a couple basic workflows using XML tools on top of XLSX workbooks that are mapped to an XML schema. You would enter data into the spreadsheet, export the XML and I had some scripts that would then work with the data.
Now I'm trying to eliminate that step and build a more integrated and portable tool that others could use easily by moving from XSLT/XQuery to Python. I would still like to use Excel for the data entry, but have the Python script read the XLSX file directly.
I found a bunch of easy to use libraries to read from Excel but they need to explicitly state what cells the data is in, like range('A1:C2') etc. The useful thing about using the XML maps was that users could resize or even move tables to fit different rows and rename sheets. Is their a library that would let me select tables as units?
Another approach I tried was to just uncompress the XLSX and just parse the XML directly. The problem with that is that our data is quite complex (taking up to 30-50 sheets) and parsing that in the uncompressed XLSX structure is really daunting. I did find my XML schema within the uncompressed XLSX, so is there any way to reformat the data into this schema outside of Excel? (basically what Excel does when I save a workbook as an .xml file)
The Excel format is pretty complicated with dependencies between components – you can't for example be sure of that the order of the worksheets in the folder worksheets has any bearing to what the file looks like in Excel.
I don't really understand exactly what you're trying to do but the existing libraries present an interface for client code that hides the XML layer. If you don't want that you'll have to root around for the parts that you find useful. In openpyxl you want to look at the stuff in openpyxl/reader specifically worksheet.py.
However, you might have better luck using lxml as this (using libxml2 in the background) will allow you load a single XML into Python and manipulate it directly using the .objectify() method. We don't do this in openpyxl because XML trees consume a lot of memory (and many people have very large worksheets) but the library for working with Powerpoint shows just how easy this can be.
I got an excel file that has four sheets. One sheet, sheet 4. contains data in simple CSV and the others read the data of this sheet and make different calculations and graphs. In my python application I would like to open the excel file, open sheet 4, and replace the data. I know you technically can't open and edit excel however you like with Python, due to the complex file structure of XLS (previous relevant answer), but is there a work around for this specific case? Remember the only thing I want to do is to open the data sheet, write to it, and ignore the others...
Note: Previous answers to relevant questions have suggested using the copy function in xlutils. But that doesn't work in this case, as the rest of the sheets are rather complex. The graphs, for example, can't be preserved with the copy function.
I used to use pyExcelerator. It did certainly a good job, but I'm not sure if it is maintained.
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/pyExcelerator/
hth.
I would like to try and make a program which does the following, preferably in Python, but if it needs to be C# or other, that's OK.
Writes data to an excel spreadsheet
Makes Excel recalculate formulas etc. in the modified spreadsheet
Extracts the results back out
I have used things like openpyxl before, but this obviously can't do step 2. Is the a way of recalculating the spreadsheet without opening it in Excel? Any thoughts greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Jack
You need some sort of UI automation with which you can control a UI application such as Excel. Excel probably exposes some COM interface that you should be able to use for what you need. Python has the PyWin32 library which you should install, after which you'll have the win32com module available.
See also:
Excel Python API
Automation Excel from Python
If you don't necessarily have to work with Excel specifically and just need to do spreadsheet using Python, you might want to look at http://manns.github.io/pyspread/.
you could you pandas for reading in the data, using python to recalculate and then write the new files.
For pandas it's something like:
#Import Excel file
xls = pd.ExcelFile('path_to_file' + '/' + 'file.xlsx')
xls.parse('nyc-condominium-dataset', index_col='property_id', na_values=['NA'])
so not difficult. Here the link to pandas.
Have fun!