Fun with Spreadsheets

Spreadsheets are one of the most versatile and omnipresent tools in the world of computing. Their intuitive approach of sheets and cells is used by virtually everyone that uses a computer as part of their day-to-day operations. But they allow you to apply complex operations, including the use of macro languages. There's even a running joke that whole complex businesses are managed and described within a single spreadsheet, somewhere. They are incredibly powerful tools.

This makes the ability to automate reading from and writing to spreadsheets so interesting. We'll see in this chapter how to process spreadsheets, mainly in the most common format, Excel. The final recipe will cover a free alternative, LibreOffice, and in particular, how to use Python as a scripting language inside it.

Python presents advantages over using specific tools included in spreadsheet suites. First, it is more versatile than custom tools like VBA, which...