Doing a kind of Excel scrollable table with tkinter

Question

I want to display a table (variable number of rows) with tkinter where:

• The size of the window is adjsuted to the content
• Vertical scrolling is proposed if the there are too many rows
• Vertical scrolling can be done with the wheelmouse inside the table (as in Excel)
• Copying the value of one cell is possible (right click on the cell)

This post (Adding a scrollbar to a group of widgets in Tkinter) is helpful to understand scrolling with tkinter...but doesn't fulfill with all requirements above.

Answer 1

The main tricks are:

• Only few tkinter objects are scrollables (Canvas are scrollable)
• Inside the canvas, don't use grid or pack (you would loose scrollability) but the method dedicated to canvas called 'create_window'
• Inside the window of your canvas create a frame...like that inside your frame you can well use pack/grid methods.
• Resize the canvas to the content....each time content is added into the frame (<Configure> event)
• The way mousewheel event is caught depends on your OS (in the example below event.delta management is for windows)
• Well break any mousewheel event in the scrollbar (to not conflict with mousewheel event you programmed)

Here a solution example:

# Standard libraries
import tkinter as tk


class ResultWindow(tk.Tk):

    def __init__(self):

        # Initialize the GUI
        super().__init__()

        # Create the main widgets
        self.canvas = tk.Canvas(self)
        self.vsb = tk.Scrollbar(self, orient="vertical", width=25)
        self.frame = tk.Frame(self.canvas)

        # Add them to the toplevel layout
        self.canvas.pack(side="left", fill="y")
        self.vsb.pack(side="right", fill="y")
        self.canvas.create_window((0, 0), window=self.frame, anchor="nw")

        # Bind events to the widgets
        self.canvas.bind_all("<MouseWheel>", self.on_mousewheel)
        self.vsb.bind("<MouseWheel>", lambda event: "break")
        self.frame.bind("<Configure>", self.on_frame_configure)

        # Link Canvas scroll with Scrollbar
        self.canvas.configure(yscrollcommand=self.vsb.set)
        self.vsb.configure(command=self.canvas.yview)

        # Add the frame to define the way
        self.l_cell = None

        # Add arbitrary content (to create our table)
        self.add_content(200, 5)
        
    def add_content(self, rows, cols):
        
        # Declare functions to manage code labels highlighting
        set_color = lambda event: event.widget.config(bg="grey")
        reset_color = lambda event: event.widget.config(bg="SystemButtonFace")
        
        for col in range(cols):
            for row in range(rows):
                # Add the cells to the grid
                text = f"row: {row}, col: {col}"
                self.l_cell = tk.Label(self.frame, text=text, relief="solid")
                self.l_cell.grid(row=row, column=col, sticky="nsew")
                
                # Bind each cell to events
                self.l_cell.bind("<Enter>", set_color)
                self.l_cell.bind("<Leave>", reset_color)
                self.l_cell.bind("<Button-3>", self.on_click)
                
    def on_frame_configure(self, event):
        # Resize the canvas to fit with the content
        self.canvas.config(width=self.canvas.bbox("all")[2],
                           height=self.canvas.bbox("all")[3])

        # Adjust the scrollable scope to the new size of the canvas
        self.canvas.configure(scrollregion=self.canvas.bbox("all"))

    def on_mousewheel(self, event):
        # Update the scroll according to the mousewheel scroll size
        self.canvas.yview_scroll(int(-1 * (event.delta / 120)), "units")

    def on_click(self, event):
        # Clear the clipboard
        self.clipboard_clear()
        # Get the Label widget code and add it to the clipboard
        self.clipboard_append(event.widget.cget("text"))
        
app = ResultWindow()
app.mainloop()