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Date: Sat, 30 May 2015 07:24:22 -0500
From: Tim Chase <python.list@tim.thechases.com>
To: Justin Thyme <JustinThyme@nowhere.com>
Cc: python-list@python.org
Subject: Re: Python write to spreadsheet?
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On 2015-05-30 10:30, Justin Thyme wrote:
> Is it possible to write a Python program that will start MS Excel, 
> create a spreadsheet and fill cells A1 to A10 (say) with the data
> in a Python array?  The answer is surely yes, but is there an
> outline of how to do it somewhere?

it depends on how strictly you want to keep your order of operations.

You *can* use Windows API calls to automate Excel, instructing it to
create a new sheet, then populate the various cells with data.
However, this is fragile, Windows-specific, and requires the target
to have Excel on their machine.

If you're willing to forego your specified ordering and create a
file, then open it in Excel, you can use the add-on xlrd/xlwt packages
(the former reads, the latter writes) to write XLS files that you can
then open in Excel.

Finally, if you're going down that route, the *easiest* way is to
simply use Python's csv module from the standard library.

  import csv
  FILENAME = "out.csv"
  with open(FILENAME, 'wb') as f:
    w = csv.writer(f)
    for item in data:
      w.writerow([
        item,
        #, ""  # optionally add a blank column because
               # some parsers like csv.Sniffer will notice
               # the lack of commas and try to find the most
               # common repeated string
        ])

You can then launch that file in Excel, or even better, whatever the
registered program is:

  import os, sys, subprocess
  def open_file(filename):
    if sys.platform == "win32":
      os.startfile(filename)
    else:
      if sys.platform == "darwin":
        program = "open"
      else:
        program = "xdg-open"
      subprocess.call([program, filename])
  open_file(FILENAME)

-tkc