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Possible to read/write Excel files in Python?

Paul Brian paul1brian at yahoo.com
Thu Oct 4 12:08:21 EDT 2001 
Could I suggest the following:

1) install a windows box and use the win32 extensions to setup the excel
spreadsheet as a COM server, then push that data to your python application
via smtplib or xmlrpc or whatever.

or

2) install Sun StarOffice (www.sun.com) - this is a cross platform MS office
clone and can "read" an excel spreadsheet. I am not too sure how to automate
staroffice, so you may not be better off, but it has its own macro language.
THe latest beta can apparently read office XP, but the release version can
only really do office 97, it apparently struggles with office 2000.

or

3)  Get whoever is sending them to send them as plain CSV. I think you said
you had no control over that but trying using chocolates ;-)

I personally would plump for the first, it's simpler on you and your time is
money as they say.
Any attempts to read the file formats without MS are almost certainly liable
to be problematic, as even sun had troubles reverse-engineering office 2000.



Steven Sartorius <ssartor at bellatlantic.net> wrote in message
news:B7E0C563.2C4A%ssartor at bellatlantic.net...
> I'm running 2.1.1 on an i386 NetBSD box and the application I'm working on
> needs to grab some data from an Excel spreadsheet.  I've found a couple of
> apps (xlHTML for example) that will take a spreadsheet and turn it into
> html/text and I've seen an article on IBM's web site talking about how to
> read/write Excel with perl.  Is there anything out there that will let me
> manipulate spreadsheets directly from Python?  I'm not big on perl and I'd
> hate to have to do Excel->perl->python!
>
> Any help much appreciated...
>
>
> Steve Sartorius
>
>
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