Python for Excel: A Modern Environment for Automation and Data Analysis

by Felix Zumstein

While Excel remains ubiquitous in the business world, recent Microsoft feedback forums are full of requests to include Python as an Excel scripting language. In fact, it's the top feature requested. What makes this combination so compelling? In this hands-on guide, Felix Zumstein--creator of xlwings, a popular open source package for automating Excel with Python--shows experienced Excel users how to integrate these two worlds efficiently.

Excel has added quite a few new capabilities over the past couple of years, but its automation language, VBA, stopped evolving a long time ago. Many Excel power users have already adopted Python for daily automation tasks. This guide gets you started.

Use Python without extensive programming knowledgeGet started with modern tools, including Jupyter notebooks and Visual Studio codeUse pandas to acquire, clean, and analyze data and replace typical Excel calculationsAutomate tedious tasks like consolidation of Excel workbooks and production of Excel reportsUse xlwings to build interactive Excel tools that use Python as a calculation engineConnect Excel to databases and CSV files and fetch data from the internet using Python codeUse Python as a single tool to replace VBA, Power Query, and Power Pivot

Genres: Programming, Reference, Business, Coding, Technical, Nonfiction

567 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 4, 2021

Reviews

[Joe Michalak · Rating 4 out of 5]

First of all, I am extremely excited to implement many of the things that I learned in this book in my personal coding projects and in my work projects. The author clearly comes from a realistic view of the business world, which is that it runs on excel.

The thing which I commend most about the book is that the author finds a good balance between providing a thorough overview of various methods of using Python and Excel together, while being able to highlight the solution that he created in a "non-salesy" method (Unlike the new software that I use at work which requires you to take a training class on how to convince your colleagues of the benefits of using it...)

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great introduction to effectively utilizing Python with Excel and to the xlwings package. Generally clear and well-written, however several of the example files failed to run properly, likely due to changes in the referenced packages since publication (e.g., referencing "seaborn" as a matplotlib style name, not supplying the "package_name" argument to the sqlalchemy Engine.Connection.Execute() method in the form of a dictionary, etc.). Looking forward, hopefully, to an update that incorporates Microsoft's recently released "Python in Excel" functionality.

[Hoanggiang · Rating 4 out of 5]

Giới thiệu cách sử dụng Padas để đọc dữ liệu từ các file excel, CSV...vào dataframe, sau khi sử lý sơ bộ dữ liệu, dùng các Packages để ghi vào file excel mới. Cuốn sách này cũng giới thiệu sơ qua về python và các package thông dụng như: OpenPyxl, xlsxwriter, xlwings...Một cuốn sách hay để tìm hiểu về Excel Automation