Excel Reports

Everybody who has spent some time working in a business of any size knows that Excel is ubiquitous. It’s surprising that there are so few companies out there working in the spreadsheet world.

Recently I had to create a bunch of Excel reports, and I took some time to explore ideas on how to structure a library for easy report creation. I took the excellent XlsxWriter library and built a few conveniences on top of it. Check out the first iteration of XlsxReports in my Github page.

The code to create a report looks like this:

#!/usr/bin/python2

"""Example XLS report."""

__author__ = '[email protected]'

from XlsxReports.layout import (
  HideOutsideLayout,
  PaddingLayout,
  TableLayout)
from XlsxReports.style import (
  EmptyStyle,
  FixedStyle,
  TableStyle)
from XlsxReports.table import Table
from XlsxReports.xls import new_workbook


LIGHT_GREY = '#BBBBBB'


def main():
  workbook = new_workbook('my_file.xlsx')
  sheet = workbook.add_worksheet('TableData')

  table = Table('Data', ['Name', 'Id', 'Data'])
  table.add_row(['John', '1', 'First'])
  table.add_row(['Jane', '2', 'Second'])

  table_style = TableStyle(workbook, table)
  table_layout = TableLayout(table_style, table)

  padding_style = FixedStyle(workbook, '', LIGHT_GREY)
  padding_layout = PaddingLayout(padding_style, table_layout,
                                 1, 1, 1, 1)

  overall_style = EmptyStyle(workbook)
  overall_layout = HideOutsideLayout(overall_style,
                                     padding_layout)

  start_position = (0, 0)
  overall_layout.draw(sheet, start_position)
  workbook.close()


if __name__ == '__main__':
  main()

and generates an Excel spreadsheet like the following:

A spreadsheet generated with Python

Please, let me know if you find it useful!

Written on July 12, 2014