Develop Reference

Uploading files using design pattern with python

I used to upload csv, excel, json or geojson files in my a postegreSQL using Python/Django.
I noticed that the scripts is redundant and sometimes difficult to maintain when we need to update key or columns. Is there a way to use design pattern? I have never used it before.
Any suggestion or links could be hep!

Read and write a single cell in excel using Python

I am looking to replace the database (SQL)(around 50,00050 rowscolumns) for my app with excel. I need to update a single cell in excel without loading the whole workbook and then saving it again (I am using Openpyxl) as it is computationally very expensive. I need an alternative that will help me save execution time.
I have tried excel APIs like xlwings but need an alternative to APIs

I cannot comment yet, so I will "answer". Why would you replace a database with Excel? Sounds crazy to me. There are plenty of other persistent storage file systems out there to use, pickle, HD5, pyarrow stuff, csv, etc.. I used the feather format for a while, super fast and pandas can use it natively.

Generating correct excel xls format

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.

Writing to a Google Document With Python

I have some data that I want to write to a simple multi-column table in Google Docs. Is this way too cumbersome to even begin attempting? I would just render it in XHTML, but my client has a very specific work flow set up on Google Docs that she doesn't want me to interfere with. The Google Docs API seems more geared toward updating metadata and making simple changes to the file format than it is toward undertaking the task of writing entire documents using only raw data and a few formatting rules. Am I missing something, or are there any other libraries that might be able to achieve this?

From the docs:
What can this API do?
The Google Documents List API allows developers to create, retrieve,
update, and delete Google Docs (including but not limited to text
documents, spreadsheets, presentations, and drawings), files, and
collections.
So maybe you could save your data to an excel worksheet temporarily and then upload and convert this.
Saving to excel can be done with xlwt:
import xlwt
workbook = xlwt.Workbook()
sheet = workbook.add_sheet('Sheet 1')
sheet.write(0,1,'First text')
workbook.save('test.xls')

Set cell format in Google Sheets spreadsheet using its API & Python

I am using gd_client.UpdateCell to update values in a google spreadsheet and am looking for a way to update the formatting of the cell i.e. color, lines, textsize.....
Can this be done?
Are there examples or other documentation available?
Anything to get me going would be great

(Feb 2017) As of Google I/O 2016, developers can now format cells in Google Sheets using the latest API (v4). Here's a short Python example that bolds the 1st row (assuming the file ID is SHEET_ID and SHEETS is the API service endpoint):
DATA = {'requests': [
{'repeatCell': {
'range': {'endRowIndex': 1},
'cell': {'userEnteredFormat': {'textFormat': {'bold': True}}},
'fields': 'userEnteredFormat.textFormat.bold',
}}
]}
SHEETS.spreadsheets().batchUpdate(
spreadsheetId=SHEET_ID, body=DATA).execute()
I also made a developer video on this subject if that helps (see below). BTW, you're not limited to Python, you can use any language supported by the Google APIs Client Libraries.
The latest Sheets API provides features not available in older releases, namely giving developers programmatic access to a Sheet as if you were using the user interface (frozen rows, cell formatting[!], resizing rows/columns, adding pivot tables, creating charts, etc.). If you're new to the API, I've created a few videos with somewhat more "real-world" examples:
Migrating SQL data to a Sheet plus code deep dive post
Formatting cells using the Sheets API plus code deep dive post
Generating slides from spreadsheet data plus code deep dive post
As you can tell, the Sheets API is primarily for document-oriented functionality as described above, but to perform file-level access such as import/export, copy, move, rename, etc., use the Google Drive API instead.

I don't think this can be done currently. The current APIs (both the List and Cell API) allow changing data, but not formatting.
The entire APIs are described here. Nothing about formatting:
http://code.google.com/apis/spreadsheets/data/3.0/reference.html
http://code.google.com/apis/documents/docs/3.0/reference.html
Many people requesting this in the groups but never get an answer from Google:
http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Docs-Data-APIs/browse_thread/thread/14aef72447ba48ce/9c2143fb4c8a3000?lnk=gst&q=color#9c2143fb4c8a3000
http://www.mail-archive.com/google-docs-data-apis#googlegroups.com/msg02569.html

This helped for me enormously: https://cloud.google.com/blog/products/application-development/formatting-cells-with-the-google-sheets-api

Google Apps Script looks like it might bring some of this functionality, in the Range class specifically:
https://developers.google.com/apps-script/reference/spreadsheet/range
Importantly, I have not figured out how to bind (and/or execute) a Google Apps Script to the sheet that I'm currently creating and filling using the Google Drive API and Google Sheets API.
I'm not suggesting porting your app to Google Apps Script, but I'm seriously considering it myself at this point. I'm hoping maybe someone else has some thoughts on the last missing piece of hooking the API up with the Google Apps Script.