Show HN: Script Excel with Python

This is great guys! We cooked up a similar thing called Pyvot (pivot). It's OSS/Apache - feel free to take/contribute. Cheers, smortaz@microsoft.<p>Video: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oi3QKuFugWk&#38;hd=1" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oi3QKuFugWk&#38;hd=1</a><p>edit - link to project: <a href="http://pytools.codeplex.com" rel="nofollow">http://pytools.codeplex.com</a>

I still have a soft spot for VBA, especially in Excel. I wrote a supply-chain management application in Excel+VBA that's still in production today. As comfortable as I am with VBA, I wouldn't mind in the least ditching it for Python, which makes writing routine methods trivial. Great work!

That's very clever. However, the ultimate integration of spreadsheet and Python has got to be ResolverOne (<a href="http://www.resolversystems.com/products/resolver-one/" rel="nofollow">http://www.resolversystems.com/products/resolver-one/</a>) It's a really amazing experience.

Nice.<p>Also see PyXLL (<a href="http://pyxll.com/" rel="nofollow">http://pyxll.com/</a>), which lets you write Excel plugins in Python (CPython).

What is the licensing for this? I couldn't tell whether this was free, if I had to pay, if it was open source, GPL, etc.

The big question I have is why would I use this instead of a real database. If i am not mistaken excel can hook up to ODBC sources and then I can just script things as I normally would using the database drivers.

Impressive. Would people I share a spreadsheet with need the plugin?

This isn't necessary, you can have access to the full Excel COM API, with tab-completion, backwards-compatibility etc, for free with iPython and the makepy.py script.<p><a href="http://stackoverflow.com/a/445961" rel="nofollow">http://stackoverflow.com/a/445961</a><p>Though I admit scripting Excel from Python should be easier to setup than it is.

This is awesome! I plan to use this 100%. Sent it to a few other excel power users in my org, thank you for this

If you want to call Python functions from Excel in the form of user defined functions, macros or menu functions (including macros bound to UI widgets and application events) you should take a look at PyXLL (www.pyxll.com).<p>This has been around for a couple of years now and actively maintained and supported, and is in use by many organisations already. It supports all versions of Excel from 2000 onwards, with some features only available in later versions (eg asynchronous functions are only in Excel 2010).<p>It uses cPython so all the standard libraries are usable.<p>Calling back into Excel is quite straightforward using win32com, and there are examples on the website that show how to do that.<p>With PyXLL you can write plain Python code that you can use outside Excel as well - so it's quite easy to write a library of functions that can be called from normal Python scripts as well as expose them to Excel at the same time.<p>I'm not sure what this project adds over what's already available but I'd be very interested to hear what other people's opinons are.

This seems really cool, but I'm admittedly not familiar with this area. How does this compare or supplement to Excel VBScript?

That's funny, I just used xlrd and xlrt and had to convert about 100 files to 97-2003 workbooks

This seems pretty great. Any plans for compatibility with Excel 2003 and 2007?

Any plans for OS X support?

This solves a real business problem for a lot of people. I'm doubly impressed that it was done by a recent grad and someone still in school.<p>You guys have a bright future in front of you.

This is great. I have to work with some very complex excel/VBA apps and this will be a breath of fresh air.<p>Is there anything out there that allows using C# to script/control excel?

Honest question; I havent tried to script xl or word for years. What is this doing that I couldn't do with IronPython or IronRuby?

REALLY wish this was available for Mac.

From a conversation with them, they are intending to charge around $2000/seat/month. This takes it out of the realm of possibility for me, but <a href="http://excel-dna.net/" rel="nofollow">http://excel-dna.net/</a> looks like it will fit the bill with a little elbow grease.

This is very interesting! Wrapping the entire Excel object model in Python must be a huge work.

Great work. I am a long time finance geek - this will make life decidedly easier.

Calligra Sheets allows scripting with python, ruby and js!<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calligra_Sheets" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calligra_Sheets</a>

I love you. So much.

Any plans to support pivot tables?

niiiice! :) python is definitely better than vba, didn't think of this use for it!

Is this an open source project, or are you planning to sell it?

Done two years ago:<p>Code.google.com/p/pyinex<p>O.83 alpha version includes the code.