I am not replying to anything below so I have removed it.
So I need to remind people of the topic and how it has wandered.
Someone has data in a not particularly great format in an EXCEL spreadsheet.
They want to somehow use an external language like Python to manipulate the
contents from outside and keep the results inside the same or perhaps another
EXCEL file.
Now EXCEL has had programming available for a long time within the spreadsheet
and perhaps some of that was once used within the actual spreadsheet and stored
as macros or whatever using something like VBA. Or perhaps someone used to
update by hand.
So the suggestions to copy the data ONCE into something else (a CSV, database,
whatever) that can be used externally are reasonable but seem to be resisted. I
would guess some of the "missing" functionality others wonder about such as
making reports, may still be available within other sheets or parts of the
EXCEL .xlsx or other format file.
An interesting third option that has not been mentioned would be to port the
data into another application like Google Sheets which has a fairly similar
spreadsheet format with very different internals but many ways for a program to
read and adjust the contents such as Google Apps Script that can also do things
like send out emails and so on.
Instead, someone suggested Python which indeed, with lots of work, can open
just about ANY nonsensical file and diddle around and rewrite it, but WHY?
Unless you find the right modules and use them carefully, it seems the hard way
to go. Sure, you can in theory do it but the amount of learning and work
involved seems excessive for what you get. And when you are done with what was
requested here, you probably need to add other features that will again be
painful. If you were hiring someone with experience, you might be paying more
and more and end up with a package hard for anyone else to understand, let
alone maintain and expand.
An intermediate solution seems to be to copy the darn data from EXCEL and
modifies it to be easy to use and make changes but make available
functionality that saves the data when needed back into an EXCEL file, but most
of the time manipulates it the easy way.
As such, if the request continues to be to do it the hard way, i may be among
those who ignores this thread any further.
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