In a previous post (which turned out to be pretty popular) I showed you how to read Excel files with Python. Now for the reverse: writing Excel files.

First, you’ll need to install the xlwt package by John Machin.

The basics

In order to write data to an Excel spreadsheet, first you have to initialize a Workbook object and then add a Worksheet object to that Workbook. It goes something like this:

Now that the sheet is created, it’s very easy to write data to it.

When you’re done, save the workbook (you don’t have to close it like you do with a file object)

Digging deeper

Overwriting cells

Worksheet objects, by default, give you a warning when you try to overwrite:

To change this behavior, use the cell_overwrite_ok=True kwarg when creating the worksheet, like so:

Now you can overwrite sheet 2 (but not sheet 1).

More goodies