Hacker News Reader

I still like Excel for certain things but I don't know why you wouldn't just use Pandas instead of this and cut out Excel.

View on HN

Pandas doesn't do formatting very well. Using pandas to generate non tabular data is also a non starter. So using pandas to fill out an existing Excel file, say by entering data in specific cells, won't work.

Libraries like xlread and xlwrite can and would be one way to automate such processes. Xlwings can too. I think that Xlwings can do macros where the others can't though

Excel is just xml file. What I do is design the excel file how I need it. Export/Save as XML then use jinja2 and template it.

First sheet is usually raw data in standard rows/columns, second sheet would have the cells I need, etc a cell for sum of x columns from sheet 1.

Then use panda’s to get the data, and feed it through jinja2’s template render function.

Clever! I've written routines to use xlsxwriter for things like exporting a table to a sheet. It was a fair bit of effort the first time, but now its an easy function call.

Excel has become the de facto report writer. Look at how many products have Excel plug ins. This allows them to skip the UI development and the report writing portion.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com