Excel file read/write?

[John Machin]

Podi wrote:
> As far as I know, there is pyXLWriter for writing and xlrd for reading.

Most folk would seem to be using pyExcelerator rather than pyXLWriter.
It is much more up to date, it just hasn't been worked on for a year,
whereas pyXLWriter is obsolete (doesn't write latest Excel file format)
and is deliberately/officially in Norwegian Blue Parrot emulation mode.

> Is there such thing so that one can open an Excel file into memory and
> read/update any sheet/cell on the fly. One analogy to this is the
> ConfigParser module.

There is no pure Python platform-independent facility that requires no
other software to be installed. Your choices are:

1. Python COM interface (part of
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pywin32/) with lots of users (and hence
readily available help in this newsgroup), examples, etc -- but
requires (a) Windows OS (b) Microsoft Excel

2. OpenOffice.org has a built-in Python -- 2.n where n is a small
number :-( and almost impenetrable documentation -- Sybren Stuvel has
published some examples: http://www.stuvel.eu/ooo-python
but my guess is that all the users of the OOo interface could fit in a
taxi.

3. Gnumeric is rumoured to have a similar scripting facility.