xlutils.copy

The function in this module copies xlrd.Book objects into xlwt.Workbook objects so they can be manipulated. You may wish to do this, for example, if you have an existing excel file where you want to change some cells.

You would start by opening the file with xlrd:

>>> from os.path import join
>>> from xlrd import open_workbook
>>> rb = open_workbook(join(test_files,'testall.xls'), formatting_info=True, on_demand=True)
>>> rb.sheet_by_index(0).cell(0,0).value
u'R0C0'
>>> rb.sheet_by_index(0).cell(0,1).value
u'R0C1'

You would then use xlutils.copy to copy the xlrd.Book object into an xlwt.Workbook object:

>>> from xlutils.copy import copy
>>> wb = copy(rb)

Now that you have an xlwt.Workbook, you can modify cells and then save the changed workbook back to a file:

>>> wb.get_sheet(0).write(0,0,'changed!')
>>> wb.save(join(temp_dir.path,'output.xls'))
>>> temp_dir.listdir()
output.xls

This file can now be loaded using xlrd to see the changes:

>>> rb = open_workbook(join(temp_dir.path,'output.xls'))
>>> rb.sheet_by_index(0).cell(0,0).value
u'changed!'
>>> rb.sheet_by_index(0).cell(0,1).value
u'R0C1'

Note

You should always pass on_demand=True to open_workbook() as this uses much less memory!