Working With Excel Spread Sheets
Working With Excel Spread Sheets
Working With Excel Spread Sheets
Python does not come with OpenPyXL, so you’ll have to install it. Follow the
instructions for installing third-party modules in Appendix A; the name of the
module is openpyxl. To test whether it is installed correctly, enter the following
into the interactive shell:
If the module was correctly installed, this should produce no error messages.
Remember to import the openpyxl module before running the interactive shell
examples in this chapter, or you’ll get a NameError: name 'openpyxl' is not
defined error.
This book covers version 2.3.3 of OpenPyXL, but new versions are regularly
released by the OpenPyXL team. Don’t worry, though: New versions should stay
backward compatible with the instructions in this book for quite some time. If you
have a newer version and want to see what additional features may be available
to you, you can check out the full documentation for OpenPyXL
at http://openpyxl.readthedocs.org/.
Figure 12-1. The tabs for a workbook’s sheets are in the lower-left corner of Excel.
Sheet 1 in the example file should look like Table 12-1. (If you didn’t
download example.xlsx from the website, you should enter this data into the
sheet yourself.)
Table 12-1. The example.xlsx Spreadsheet
A B C
1 4/5/2015 1:34:02 PM Apples 73
2 4/5/2015 3:41:23 AM Cherries 85
3 4/6/2015 12:46:51 PM Pears 14
4 4/8/2015 8:59:43 AM Oranges 52
5 4/10/2015 2:07:00 AM Apples 152
6 4/10/2015 6:10:37 PM Bananas 23
7 4/10/2015 2:40:46 AM Strawberries 98
Now that we have our example spreadsheet, let’s see how we can manipulate it
with the openpyxl module.
You can get a list of all the sheet names in the workbook by calling
the get_sheet_names() method. Enter the following into the interactive shell:
Once you have a Worksheet object, you can access a Cell object by its name.
Enter the following into the interactive shell:
OpenPyXL will automatically interpret the dates in column A and return them
as datetime values rather than strings. The datetime data type is explained
further in Chapter 16.
1 Apples
3 Pears
5 Apples
7 Strawberries
Say you want to go down column B and print the value in every cell with an odd
row number. By passing 2 for the range() function’s “step” parameter, you can get
cells from every second row (in this case, all the odd-numbered rows).
The for loop’s i variable is passed for the row keyword argument to
the cell() method, while 2 is always passed for the column keyword argument.
Note that the integer 2, not the string 'B', is passed.
Note that the max_column method returns an integer rather than the letter that
appears in Excel.
After you import these two functions from the openpyxl.cell module, you can
call get_column_letter() and pass it an integer like 27 to figure out what the letter
name of the 27th column is. The function column_index_string() does the reverse:
You pass it the letter name of a column, and it tells you what number that column
is. You don’t need to have a workbook loaded to use these functions. If you want,
you can load a workbook, get a Worksheet object, and call a Worksheet object
method like max_column to get an integer. Then, you can pass that integer
to get_column_letter().
To print the values of each cell in the area, we use two for loops. The
outer for loop goes over each row in the slice ❶. Then, for each row, the
nested for loop goes through each cell in that row ❷.
To access the values of cells in a particular row or column, you can also use
a Worksheet object’s rows and columns attribute. Enter the following into the
interactive shell:
Apples
Cherries
Pears
Oranges
Apples
Bananas
Strawberries
As a quick review, here’s a rundown of all the functions, methods, and data types
involved in reading a cell out of a spreadsheet file:
1. Import the openpyxl module.
2. Call the openpyxl.load_workbook() function.
3. Get a Workbook object.
4. Read the active member variable or call
the get_sheet_by_name() workbook method.
5. Get a Worksheet object.
6. Use indexing or the cell() sheet method with row and column keyword
arguments.
7. Get a Cell object.
8. Read the Cell object’s value attribute.