excelrd 2.0.3

Library for developers to extract data from Microsoft Excel (tm) spreadsheet files

excelrd

• excelrd

• Quick start

  • Transition from xlrd to excelrd

  • Another quick start

• Acknowledgements

excelrd

excelrd is a modified version of xlrd to work for the latest Python versions. xlrd will not work at Python 3.9 or newer versions.

Purpose: Provide a library for developers to use to extract data from Microsoft Excel (tm) spreadsheet files. It is not an end-user tool.

Author: John Machin

Licence: BSD-style (see licences.py)

Versions of Python supported: 3.5+.

Outside scope: excelrd will safely and reliably ignore any of these if present in the file:

• Charts, Macros, Pictures, any other embedded object. WARNING: currently this includes embedded worksheets.

• VBA modules

• Formulas (results of formula calculations are extracted, of course).

• Comments

• Hyperlinks

• Autofilters, advanced filters, pivot tables, conditional formatting, data validation

• Handling password-protected (encrypted) files.

Quick start

Print all of the cell values in a specific sheet:

Sample Code:

import excelrd


def main():
    book = excelrd.open_workbook("namesdemo.xls")

    print("The number of worksheets is {}".format(book.nsheets))
    print("Worksheet name(s): {}".format(", ".join(book.sheet_names())))

    sh = book.sheet_by_index(2)
    print("{}: rows={}, cols={}".format(sh.name, sh.nrows, sh.ncols))

    for row_idx in range(sh.nrows):
        for col_idx in range(sh.ncols):
            cell = sh.cell(row_idx, col_idx)

            if not cell.value:
                continue

            print("row={}, col={}, value={}".format(row_idx, col_idx, cell.value))

Transition from xlrd to excelrd

Just replace the import xlrd:

import excelrd as xlrd

Another quick start

This will show the first, second and last rows of each sheet in each file:

python PYDIR/scripts/runxlrd.py 3rows *blah*.xls

Acknowledgements

• This package started life as a translation from C into Python of parts of a utility called “xlreader” developed by David Giffin. “This product includes software developed by David Giffin [e-mail].”

• OpenOffice.org has truly excellent documentation of the Microsoft Excel file formats and Compound Document file format, authored by Daniel Rentz. See http://sc.openoffice.org

• U+5F20 U+654F: over a decade of inspiration, support, and interesting decoding opportunities.

• Ksenia Marasanova: sample Macintosh and non-Latin1 files, alpha testing

• Backporting to Python 2.1 was partially funded by Journyx - provider of timesheet and project accounting solutions (http://journyx.com/).

• Provision of formatting information in version 0.6.1 was funded by Simplistix Ltd (http://www.simplistix.co.uk/)