rustypyxl 0.1.1

A fast, Rust-powered Excel xlsx library for Python with openpyxl-compatible API

rustypyxl

A high-performance Excel (XLSX) library for Python, written in Rust. Drop-in replacement for openpyxl with 10-20x faster read/write performance.

Installation

pip install rustypyxl

Usage

import rustypyxl

# Load a workbook
wb = rustypyxl.load_workbook('input.xlsx')
ws = wb.active

# Read values
value = wb.get_cell_value('Sheet1', 1, 1)

# Write values
wb.set_cell_value('Sheet1', 1, 1, 'Hello')
wb.set_cell_value('Sheet1', 2, 1, 42.5)
wb.set_cell_value('Sheet1', 3, 1, '=SUM(A1:A2)')

# Bulk operations (fastest)
wb.write_rows('Sheet1', [
    ['Name', 'Age', 'Score'],
    ['Alice', 30, 95.5],
    ['Bob', 25, 87.3],
])

data = wb.read_rows('Sheet1', min_row=1, max_row=100)

# Save
wb.save('output.xlsx')

Features

• Fast: 10-20x faster than openpyxl for large files
• Compatible: Drop-in replacement for common openpyxl patterns
• Full-featured:
  • Cell values (string, number, boolean, date, formula)
  • Cell formatting (font, alignment, fill, borders, number formats)
  • Comments and hyperlinks
  • Named ranges
  • Sheet protection
  • Data validation
  • Merged cells
  • Column/row dimensions
  • Configurable compression

Performance

In micro benchmarks on M1 MacBook (1M rows × 20 columns):

Operation	rustypyxl	openpyxl	Speedup
Write	~10s	~200s	20x
Read	~11s	~180s	16x

Read Performance vs calamine

rustypyxl is also faster than calamine, a popular Rust Excel reader (with Python bindings via python-calamine):

Dataset	rustypyxl	calamine	openpyxl	vs calamine	vs openpyxl
10k × 20 (numeric)	0.13s	0.21s	1.16s	1.7x	9.1x
10k × 20 (strings)	0.14s	0.26s	2.97s	1.9x	21x
100k × 20 (numeric)	0.84s	1.76s	11.5s	2.1x	14x
100k × 20 (mixed)	1.40s	2.36s	32.9s	1.7x	24x

Unlike calamine (read-only), rustypyxl also supports writing Excel files.

Building from Source

# Install Rust and maturin
curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -sSf https://sh.rustup.rs | sh
pip install maturin

# Build
maturin develop --release

License

MIT