This may be a long shot, but I figured it's worth asking. I need a way to programmatically insert externally linked images in excel, meaning that every time you open the file, the spreadsheet will contact the url at which the image is located. It's easy to do this manually in excel, but I want to do it programmatically, preferably with python. I've tried using the openpyxl and XlsxWriter libraries, but neither have this specific functionality. My only other option is to look for the excel source code so I can see how an externally linked image is represented by excel. I don't suppose Microsoft makes that source code public, do they?
Thanks for any suggestions
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Thanks for taking the time to read my question.
I am working on a personal project to learn python scripting for excel, and I want to learn how to move data from one workbook to another.
In this example, I am emulating a company employee ledger that has name, position, address, and more (The organizations is by row so every employee takes up one row). But the project is to have a selected number of people be transferred to a new ledger (another excel file). So I have a list of emails in a .txt file (it could even be another excel file but I thought .txt would be easier), and I would want the script to run through the .txt file, get the emails, and look for any rows that have a matching email address(all emails are in cell 'B'). And if any are found, then copy that entire row to the new excel file.
I tried a lot of ways to make this work, but I could not figure it out. I am really new to python so I am not even sure if this is possible. Would really appreciate some help!
You have essentially two packages that will allow manipulation of Excel files. For reading in data and performing analysis the standard package for use is pandas. You can save the files as .xlsx however you are only really working with base table data and not the file itself (IE, you are extracing data FROM the file, not working WITH the file)
However what you need is really to perform manipulation on Excel files directly which is better done with openpyxl
You can also read files (such as your text file) using with open function that is native to Python and is not a third party import like pandas or openpyxl.
Part of learning to program includes learning how to use documentation.
As such, here is the documentation you require with sufficient examples to learn openpyxl: https://openpyxl.readthedocs.io/en/stable/
And you can learn about pandas here: https://pandas.pydata.org/docs/user_guide/index.html
And you can learn about python with open here: https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/inputoutput.html
Hope this helps.
EDIT: It's possible I or another person can give you a specific example using your data / code etc, but you would have to provide it fully. Since you're learning, I suggest using the documentation or youtube.
In the environment, we have an excel file, which includes rawdata in one sheet and pivot table and charts in another sheet.
I need to append rows every day to raw data automatically using a python job.
I am not sure, but there may be some VB Script running on the front end which will refresh the pivot tables.
I used openpyxl and by following its online documentation, I was able to append rows and save the workbook. I used keep_vba=true while loading the workbook to keep the VBA modules inside to enable pivoting. But after saving the workbook, the xlsx is not being opened anymore using MS office and saying the format or the extension is not valid. I can see the data using python but with office, its not working anymore. If I don't use keep_vba=true, then pivoting is not working, only the previous values are present (ofcourse as I understood, as VBA script is needed for pivoting).
Could you explain me what's happening? I am new to python and don't know its concepts much.
How can I fix this in openpyxl or is there any better alternative other than openpyxl. Data connections in MS office is not an option for me.
As I understood, xlsx may need special modules to save the VB script to save in the same way as it may be saved using MS office. If it is, then what is the purpose of keep_vba=true ?
I would be grateful if you could explain in more detail. I would love to know.
As I have very short time to complete this task, I am looking for a quick answer here, instead of going through all the concepts.
Thankyou!
You have to save the files with the extension ".xlsm" rather than ".xlsx". The .xlsx format exists specifically to provide the user with assurance that there is no VBA code within the file. This is an Excel standard and not a problem with openpyxl. With that said, I haven't worked with openpyxl, so I'm not sure what you need to do to be sure your files are properly converted to .xlsm.
Edit: Sorry, misread your question first time around. Easiest step would be to set keep_vba=False. That might resolve your issue right there, since you're telling openpyxl to look for VBA code that can't possibly exist in an xlsx file. Hard to say more than that until you post the relevant section of your code.
I need to create some excel tables, but these tables don't have simple look.
There are some pictures, some special fonts etc.
But the complicated parts are static, that means always the same.
So my idea was, I will create an excel-template with these tricky parts and then from python just insert dynamic data to this template.
I am working with pandas framework, but I didn't find a way how to do that with or without this framework.
Any idea?
There isn't an easy way to do this with any of the usual "direct file manipulation" libraries in Python (xlrd, xlwt, XlsxWriter, OpenPyXL; these are what pandas uses). The reason is that the structure of a workbook file is such that it's impossible or prohibitively difficult (depending on whether you're talking about .xls or .xlsx) to do anything resembling "in-place" editing, short of re-implementing Excel itself.
So for what you're trying to do, your best option is to let Excel do the work. (I'm assuming you can run Excel, since you mention that you'd like to create Excel templates.) There are ways to automate Excel, the most straightforward probably being Microsoft's VBA or VBScript. But if you want to do it in Python, you can, using PyWin32 or pywinauto.
I recently started to automate a report at work using Python. Since my data was provided to me in the form of an excel sheet, I felt the best way to do this was to use an excel python module. My module of choice was openpyxl. It worked great, I've used it to perform calculations and organise my data ready to plot charts. Now here's the problem...
I know that you cannot update existing charts using openpyxl so that option went out the window.
What I then tried to do was link the data in my openpyxl spreadsheet to another spreadsheet containing the charts (which is then linked to my word document where the charts are to be displayed). So after doing this I ran my script and to my annoyance, the data links between my openpyxl spreadsheet and charts spreadsheet had been severed. I guess this is because openpyxl creates a new spreadsheet when you save using the save function links are severed.
My question is.. are there any ways to maintain the data links?
It is currently not possible to maintain links between files. I think it would be possible to keep them metadata but, for fairly obvious reasons, it won't necessarily be possible to validate them. This best way for this to happen would be through a pull request.
If you're on Windows you might look at using the Python for Windows stuff which will allow you to remote control the applications.
I created a little script in python to generate an excel compatible xml file (saved with xls extension). The file is generated from a part database so I can place an order with the extracted data.
On the website for ordering the parts, you can import the excel file so the order fills automatically. The problem here is that each time I want to make an order, I have to open excel and save the file with xls extension of type MS Excel 97-2003 to get the import working.
The excel document then looks exactly the same, but when opened with notepad, we cannot see the xml anymore, only binary dump.
Is there a way to automate this process, by running a bat file or maybe adding some line to my python script so it is converted in the proper format?
(I know that question has been asked before, but it never has been answered)
There are two basic approaches to this.
You asked about the first: Automating Excel to open and save the file. There are in fact two ways to do that. The second is to use Python tools that can create the file directly in Python without Excel's help. So:
1a: Automating Excel through its automation interface.
Excel is designed to be controlled by external apps, through COM automation. Python has a great COM-automation interface inside of pywin32. Unfortunately, the documentation on pywin32 is not that great, and all of the documentation on Excel's COM automation interface is written for JScript, VB, .NET, or raw COM in C. Fortunately, there are a number of questions on this site about using win32com to drive Excel, such as this one, so you can probably figure it out yourself. It would look something like this:
import win32com.client
excel = win32com.client.Dispatch('Excel.Application')
spreadsheet = excel.Workbooks.Open('C:/path/to/spreadsheet.xml')
spreadsheet.SaveAs('C:/path/to/spreadsheet.xls', fileformat=excel.xlExcel8)
That isn't tested in any way, because I don't have a Windows box with Excel handy. And I vaguely remember having problems getting access to the fileformat names from win32com and just punting and looking up the equivalent numbers (a quick google for "fileformat xlExcel8" shows that the numerical equivalent is 56, and confirms that's the right format for 97-2003 binary xls).
Of course if you don't need to do it in Python, MSDN is full of great examples in JScript, VBA, etc.
The documentation you need is all on MSDN (since the Office Developer Network for Excel was merged into MSDN, and then apparently became a 404 page). The top-level page for Excel is Welcome to the Excel 2013 developer reference (if you want a different version, click on "Office client development" in the navigation thingy above and pick a different version), and what you mostly care about is the Object model reference. You can also find the same documentation (often links to the exact same webpages) in Excel's built-in help. For example, that's where you find out that the Application object has a Workbooks property, which is a Workbooks object, which has Open and Add methods that return a Workbook object, which has a SaveAs method, which takes an optional FileFormat parameter of type XlFileFormat, which has a value xlExcel8 = 56.
As I implied earlier, you may not be able to access enumeration values like xlExcel8 for some reason which I no longer remember, but you can look the value up on MSDN (or just Google it) and put the number 56 instead.
The other documentation (both here and elsewhere within MSDN) is usually either stuff you can guess yourself, or stuff that isn't relevant from win32com. Unfortunately, the already-sparse win32com documentation expects you to have read that documentation—but fortunately, the examples are enough to muddle your way through almost everything but the object model.
1b: Automating Excel via its GUI.
Automating a GUI on Windows is a huge pain, but there are a number of tools that make it a whole lot easier, such as pywinauto. You may be able to just use swapy to write the pywinauto script for you.
If you don't need to do it in Python, separate scripting systems like AutoIt have an even larger user base and even more examples to make your life easier.
2: Doing it all in Python.
xlutils, part of python-excel, may be able to do what you want, without touching Excel at all.