pyExcelerator - Can I read and modify an existing Excel-WorkBook?

[Stephen Brown]

Yes indeed, pyExcelerator does support reading data from excel 
spreadsheets.  An example of how to do this is included in the file 
xls2csv-gerry.py  under the directory ... pyExcelerator/examples/tools  
Syntax is pretty straight forward.  extract_all = parse_xls(filename, CP 
= None)  where CP is the encoding format used within tht file.  Uses 
same codes that xlrd uses, ie 'cp437' = US English.

All you need is the "parse_xls" command and simply let it iterate 
through your spreadsheet file.
EXAMPLE:

    fname = "D:\\Directory\\myfile.xls"                # an example filename
    for sheet_name, values in parse_xls(fname ): # parse_xls(arg) -- 
default encoding
        print "     name of sheet is = ", sheet_name,

Alternatively you can extract everything in one go...

    extract_all = parse_xls(fname)