Search code examples
pythonexcelxlrdxlsxwriter

Saving XlsxWriter workbook more than once

I am writing software that manipulates Excel sheets. So far, I've been using xlrd and xlwt to do so, and everything works pretty well.

  • It opens a sheet (xlrd) and copies select columns to a new workbook (xlwt)
  • It then opens the newly created workbook to read data (xlrd) and does some math and formatting with the data (which couldn't be done if the file isn't saved once) - (xlwt saves once again)

However, I am now willing to add charts in my documents, and this function is not supported by xlwt. I have found that xlsxwriter does, but this adds other complications to my code: xlsxwriter only has xlsxwriter.close(), which saves AND closes the document.

Does anyone know if there's any workaround for this? Whenever I use xlsxwriter.close(), my workbook object containing the document I'm writing isn't usable anymore.

Solution

  • Fundamentally, there is no reason you need to read twice and save twice. For your current (no charts) process, you can just read the data you need using xlrd; then do all your processing; and write once with xlwt.

    Following this workflow, it is a relatively simple matter to replace xlwt with XlsxWriter.