Getting Started with XlsxWriter

Here are some easy instructions to get you up and running with the XlsxWriter module.

Installing XlsxWriter

The first step is to install the XlsxWriter module. There are several ways to do this.

Using PIP

The pip installer is the preferred method for installing Python modules from PyPI, the Python Package Index:

$ sudo pip install XlsxWriter

Note

Windows users can omit sudo at the start of the command.

Using Easy_Install

If pip doesn’t work you can try easy_install:

$ sudo easy_install install XlsxWriter

Installing from a tarball

If you download a tarball of the latest version of XlsxWriter you can install it as follows (change the version number to suit):

$ tar -zxvf XlsxWriter-1.2.3.tar.gz

$ cd XlsxWriter-1.2.3
$ sudo python setup.py install

A tarball of the latest code can be downloaded from GitHub as follows:

$ curl -O -L http://github.com/jmcnamara/XlsxWriter/archive/master.tar.gz

$ tar zxvf master.tar.gz
$ cd XlsxWriter-master/
$ sudo python setup.py install

Cloning from GitHub

The XlsxWriter source code and bug tracker is in the XlsxWriter repository on GitHub. You can clone the repository and install from it as follows:

$ git clone https://github.com/jmcnamara/XlsxWriter.git

$ cd XlsxWriter
$ sudo python setup.py install

Running a sample program

If the installation went correctly you can create a small sample program like the following to verify that the module works correctly:

import xlsxwriter

workbook = xlsxwriter.Workbook('hello.xlsx')
worksheet = workbook.add_worksheet()

worksheet.write('A1', 'Hello world')

workbook.close()

Save this to a file called hello.py and run it as follows:

$ python hello.py

This will output a file called hello.xlsx which should look something like the following:

If you downloaded a tarball or cloned the repo, as shown above, you should also have a directory called examples with some sample applications that demonstrate different features of XlsxWriter.

Documentation

The full version of XlsxWriter documentation is hosted on Read The Docs. It is also available as a PDF.