Missing Features

If you’re missing a feature in xlwings, do the following:

  1. Most importantly, open an issue on GitHub. If it’s something bigger or if you want support from other users, consider opening a feature request. Adding functionality should be user driven, so only if you tell us about what you’re missing, it’s eventually going to find its way into the library. By the way, we also appreciate pull requests!

  2. Workaround: in essence, xlwings is just a smart wrapper around pywin32 on Windows and appscript on Mac. You can access the underlying objects by calling the api property:

    >>> sht = xw.Book().sheets[0]
    >>> sht.api
    <COMObject <unknown>>  # Windows/pywin32
    app(pid=2319).workbooks['Workbook1'].worksheets[1]  # Mac/appscript

    This works accordingly for the other objects like sht.range('A1').api etc.

    The underlying objects will offer you pretty much everything you can do with VBA, using the syntax of pywin32 (which pretty much feels like VBA) and appscript (which doesn’t feel like VBA). But apart from looking ugly, keep in mind that it makes your code platform specific (!), i.e. even if you go for option 2), you should still follow option 1) and open an issue so the feature finds it’s way into the library (cross-platform and with a Pythonic syntax).

Example: Workaround to use VBA’s Range.WrapText

# Windows
sht.range('A1').api.WrapText = True

# Mac