public_images VS XlsxWriter

People are all talking about how it's useful for quick stuff with datasets, but it goes far beyond that. It's useful for quick anything you might want a database for. Imagination is the limit.

For example, if any of you play D&D online, you might be familiar with dndbeyond's character sheets. They're a fantastic way to onboard new players who might not have the inclination to spend hours with the rule books before they even start playing. It does all the calculations for you and gives you some buttons for like "roll athletics" and doesn't let you add more spells than your character can have with their stats.

I recently persuaded some friends to give FATE a try and built analogous push-button character sheets with google sheets [0]. It was quick and simple. With conditional formatting, you highlight bad states (rules say you can't have more of X than Y!). With the script editor, you can add full on buttons for dice rolls and other state changes with whatever logic you want (anything you can code up!). Checkboxes are obvious but super useful. And the transparency of the calculations is helpful for teaching people the system (this stat is "min(A4, B1+C5)").

To build a stateful, database backed, live collaborative GUI that can be added to and customized without google sheets would have been a serious endeavor. With it, it was a quick fun afternoon hack. Excel/google sheets is an amazing piece of technology.

[0] Screenshot of the "app": https://github.com/imh/public_images/blob/main/Screen%20Shot...

openpyxl

If you must, use xlsxwriter to write it directly into the Excel spreadsheet. This is kind of a pain. If you can get away with, say, writing the data to a CSV and then copy-pasting it into the Excel sheet, you should do that instead because it's so much more conceptually simple and works directly with the Python data structures that you parsed in Step 3. Automation doesn't have to be completely fire-and-forget to save you a ton of time!

https://xlsxwriter.readthedocs.io/ is what you are looking for most probably. Try using this library instead of pyplot for the above steps

xlsxwriter…

I've been in this situation a few times. I would just open the excel sheet in python using xlsxwriter: https://xlsxwriter.readthedocs.io/

Bam! https://xlsxwriter.readthedocs.io

For the opposite direction, I have had good luck with the XlsxWriter library

https://github.com/jmcnamara/XlsxWriter

I'm less familiar with the R ecosystem, but there are tools in the Python world to go that direction -- https://xlsxwriter.readthedocs.io/