[Arkanosis]

Not the same thing, but this made me think about it and readers might be interested to know that the xlrd, xlwt and xlutils python modules (http://www.python-excel.org/) allow you to manipulate Excel files in Python, without even having Excel installed (it's pure Python, so it also works on Linux, for example).

[adamc]

Looks like xlrd may have been updated to read newer formats, but xlwt is still limited and cannot write .xlsx format spreadsheets, for example. openpyxl _can_ handle the newer formats, but only the newer formats.

It's a bit of a mess.

[pmorici]

Working with Excel spreadsheets in general is a mess. There really isn't a single library that does everything well and if you want of be able to get all the information like formatting, formulas, etc... the only really complete solution is to use pywin32 and com which requires Excel and isn't particularly fast or easy either.

[theophrastus]

It is a bit of a mess; documentation often amounting to a few example calls. However, I've written a fairly well received data analysis package for a government department wherein the input and output had to be in excel spreadsheets (-sigh-), using only xlrd and xlwt, alongside numpy and scipy. It's a bit Rubegoldbergian (because.. excel), but I owe a lot to the authors of xlrd and xlwt (they've even supported named regions). So i'll be curious to see how xlwings implements the numerous methods available from xlrd/xlwt.

[richiverse]

xlsx: https://xlsxwriter.readthedocs.org/ powerpoint: http://python-pptx.readthedocs.org/en/latest/ word: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/docx/0.2.4