Python Programming On Win32

Excel Concluded

Having been through the mechanics, we will now build a class to make it slightly easier to get data in and out of Excel. It’s easy already, but if you want to do a lot of work with Excel, you can certainly save a few lines of code in the users’ scripts. An example of this can be found in the file exceldemos.py.

We’ve created a class called easyExcel . When an instance is created, it starts Excel. This class provides methods to open, create, and save files, and to get and set cell values and ranges. It can also deal with the Unicode strings and time objects if you wish. You could easily extend it to add new methods, but here are a selection that should be useful:

class easyExcel:
    """A utility to make it easier to get at Excel.  Remembering
    to save the data is your problem, as is  error handling.
    Operates on one workbook at a time."""

    def __init__(self, filename=None):
        self.xlApp = win32com.client.Dispatch('Excel.Application')
        if filename:
            self.filename = filename
            self.xlBook = self.xlApp.Workbooks.Open(filename)
        else:
            self.xlBook = self.xlApp.Workbooks.Add()
            self.filename = ''  
    
    def save(self, newfilename=None):
        if newfilename:
            self.filename = newfilename
            self.xlBook.SaveAs(newfilename)
        else:
            self.xlBook.Save()    

    def close(self):
        self.xlBook.Close(SaveChanges=0)
        del self.xlApp

Now put in methods to set and get cells. Users can specify a sheet name or index, row, and column:

def getCell(self, sheet, row, col): "Get value of one cell" sht = self.xlBook.Worksheets(sheet) return ...