automate_excel: automate Microsoft Excel spreadsheets with python

automate_excel is a python library providing an interface with Microsoft Excel for the purpose of automating tasks in existing workbooks. It replaces the functionality of VBA with clean, pythonic code (and helpful exception handling!).

Unlike other existing python packages that deal with Microsoft Excel, automate_excel takes the approach of directly controlling the application via windows COM functionality rather than focusing on pulling functionality out of Excel and into python. Because of this automate_excel is well-suited for automating existing Excel tasks and processes, especially in environments where the Excel workbook can not be replaced entirely.

The automate_excel package provides the Workbook class for interfacing with documents in a Microsoft Excel application. This allows users to write programs in python that automate tasks in Microsoft Excel, without Excel Macros and VBA code.

For example:

import automate_excel as xl

with xl.Workbook('myworkbook.xlsx') as wb:
    wb['A1'] = 'hello world'
    wb.save()

Installation

automate_excel can be installed from PyPI:

pip install automate_excel

The following packages are required dependencies:

• pywin32
• pandas
• Numpy

Unfortunately, due to dependency on the pywin32 library for controlling Excel, automate_excel will only work on Windows and should not be installed on other platforms.

License

GNU General Public License v3.0

Contributions

The source code is currently hosted on GitHub at https://github.com/chrispcharlton/automate_excel

This library is currently under active development, with a limited set of core features that should allow for most common tasks in Excel to be automated. All contributions in any form (raising issues, emails, ideas, bug reports, fixes, improvements, etc) are welcome and would be most helpful.