The best ones, as I worked with them, are XlsxWriter and xlwings. Both work smoothly and efficiently and are compatible with Python and Excel.
Xlwings Has two versions: Free and Pro (paid version). The free version can do almost anything you need to work with an Excel file. With the paid version, you can get more functionality and support, which developers (not regular users) do not usually need.
On the other hand, XlsxWriter It is also an excellent choice. Its user community has been growing fast recently. It supports everything you need to work with an Excel file.
Both can be installed simply with uv, pip and conda.
The other libraries, such as xlrd and xlwt (unfortunately, the maintainer hasn't updated it since Aug 22, 2017), were designed in the past to handle the old version (.xls) files. They are not comparable to the other two libraries that I mentioned.
OpenPyXl is also a decent library that can handle most of your needs. However, it needs more support to grow. In my opinion, it is not yet mature.
The pandas and the PyExcel libraries are also suitable for reading and writing data to an Excel file. I prefer pandas because it is a mature and efficient library that can handle large datasets. pyexcel is a wrapper API that is less capable than Pandas and more complicated to work with.
PyXLL is a professional library that can handle almost everything a user wants in Excel with Python. One of the famous companies working on Python distributions supports the library. Unfortunately, there is no free or community version of it, and you can only choose a 30-day trial of the pro version. After that, you must pay at least $29 (USD) per month, or $299 (USD) per year. It is powerful, but it is an expensive choice for a single developer.
IronXL is another library that offers a 30-day free trial. However, after that, the cheapest license (Lite) is $749 USD for one year, and you must pay for renewal each year with a discount, which is still expensive. I personally didn't try it, but as I saw what they offer, I don't know why it is so expensive.
Of course, there are more. Libraries, Wrapers and APIs for handling Excel files (for example, a list of some open source libraries can be found in Python for Excel), but the ones that I mentioned are the most mature and popular libraries.
The best ones, as I worked with them, are XlsxWriter and xlwings. Both work smoothly and efficiently and are compatible with Python and Excel.
Xlwings Has two versions: Free and Pro (paid version). The free version can do almost anything you need to work with an Excel file. With the paid version, you can get more functionality and support, which developers (not regular users) do not usually need.
On the other hand, XlsxWriter It is also an excellent choice. Its user community has been growing fast recently. It supports everything you need to work with an Excel file.
Both can be installed simply with uv, pip and conda.
The other libraries, such as xlrd and xlwt (unfortunately, the maintainer hasn't updated it since Aug 22, 2017), were designed in the past to handle the old version (.xls) files. They are not comparable to the other two libraries that I mentioned.
OpenPyXl is also a decent library that can handle most of your needs. However, it needs more support to grow. In my opinion, it is not yet mature.
The pandas and the PyExcel libraries are also suitable for reading and writing data to an Excel file. I prefer pandas because it is a mature and efficient library that can handle large datasets. pyexcel is a wrapper API that is less capable than Pandas and more complicated to work with.
PyXLL is a professional library that can handle almost everything a user wants in Excel with Python. One of the famous companies working on Python distributions supports the library. Unfortunately, there is no free or community version of it, and you can only choose a 30-day trial of the pro version. After that, you must pay at least $29 (USD) per month, or $299 (USD) per year. It is powerful, but it is an expensive choice for a single developer.
IronXL is another library that offers a 30-day free trial. However, after that, the cheapest license (Lite) is $749 USD for one year, and you must pay for renewal each year with a discount, which is still expensive. I personally didn't try it, but as I saw what they offer, I don't know why it is so expensive.
Of course, there are more. Libraries, Wrapers and APIs for handling Excel files (for example, a list of some open source libraries can be found in Python for Excel), but the ones that I mentioned are the most mature and popular libraries.
Below are a few libraries which do that. Recommend going through them as per your requirements.
PycelformulasPandasxlwtOpenpyxl
They all blend with excel really well. You can try these out.
Hi Community, I am new to Python and want do a project in Python with an Excel file. I want to read the data from two different cols and compair each pair to look if it is correct pair or not. What library would you recommend to do this, and what should I take in mind? Because I heard that working with excel is not easy task Thanks in advance
excel - Best Python Module for Reading Data from .xlsx - Stack Overflow
parsing excel documents with python - Stack Overflow
Best Excel Library?
Is Openxyl the best library to write on Excel?
You're best bet for parsing Excel files would be the xlrd library. The python-excel.org site has links and examples for xlrd and related python excel libraries, including a pdf document that has some good examples of using xlrd. Of course, there are also lots of related xlrd questions on StackOverflow that might be of use.
One caveat with the xlrd library is that it will only work with xls (Excel 2003 and earlier versions of excel) file formats and not the more recent xlsx file format. There is a newer library openpyxl for dealing with the xlsx, but I have never used it.
UPDATE:
As per John's comment, the xlrd library now supports both xls and xlsx file formats.
Hope that helps.
The pandas library has a quick and easy way to read excel. If it's mostly just data and nothing too complicated it'll work:
import pandas as pd
ex_data = pd.read_excel('excel_file.xlsx')
It reads it into a pandas DataFrame, which is handy for data munging, etc.
To go to a list:
ex_data['column1_name'].values.tolist()
If you have multiple tables and things in each worksheet then you may want to use another library such as xlrd or openpyxl.
