How can I see the formulas of an excel spreadsheet in pandas / python?

Question

I would like to read in an excel spreadsheet to python / pandas, but have the formulae instead of the cell results.

For example, if cell A1 is 25, and cell B1 is =A1, I would like my dataframe to show:

25    =A1

Right now it shows:

25    25

How can I do so?

Solution 1

OpenPyXL provides this capacity out-of-the-box. See here and here. An example:

from openpyxl import load_workbook
import pandas as pd
wb = load_workbook(filename = 'empty_book.xlsx')
sheet_names = wb.get_sheet_names()
name = sheet_names[0]
sheet_ranges = wb[name]
df = pd.DataFrame(sheet_ranges.values)

Solution 2

Yes, it is possible. I recently found a package that solves this issue in a quite sophisticated way. It is called portable-spreadsheet (available via pip install portable-spreadsheet). It basically encapsulates xlsxwriter. Here is a simple example:

import portable_spreadsheet as ps
sheet = ps.Spreadsheet.create_new_sheet(5, 5)
# Set values
sheet.iloc[0, 0] = 25  # Set A1
sheet.iloc[1, 0] = sheet.iloc[0, 0]  # reference to A1
# Export to Excel
sheet.to_excel('output/sample.xlsx')

It works in a similar way as Pandas Dataframe.

Comments

[juanpa.arrivillaga]

I'm fairly certain there is no built-in way to do this in pandas.

[ThrowAway23948238]

I'm having trouble with implementation: stackoverflow.com/questions/42397769/…

[Aleksey Bilogur]

Looks like someone else got to it before I did. Also ,you should accept this post as an answer.

[ThrowAway23948238]

Was just waiting to validate. Now I have. Thanks!

[yaswant singh]

Hi @AlekseyBilogur any idea how we can do in CSV?

[Avik Aggarwal]

Hi @AlekseyBilogur I did give this a try, while this method reads the formula, but it seems to be removing the value itself? I read and just wrote the excel into new file, it maintained the formula, formatting and everything but truncated all values in it.