are free alternatives that run on windowsmacosand linux both libreoffice calc and openoffice calc work with excel' xlsx file format for spreadsheetswhich means the openpyxl module can work on spreadsheets from these applications as well you can download the software from if you already have excel installed on your computeryou may find these programs easier to use the screenshots in this howeverare all from excel on windows excel documents firstlet' go over some basic definitionsan excel spreadsheet document is called workbook single workbook is saved in file with the xlsx extension each workbook can contain multiple sheets (also called worksheetsthe sheet the user is currently viewing (or last viewed before closing excelis called the active sheet each sheet has columns (addressed by letters starting at aand rows (addressed by numbers starting at box at particular column and row is called cell each cell can contain number or text value the grid of cells with data makes up sheet installing the openpyxl module python does not come with openpyxlso you'll have to install it follow the instructions for installing third-party modules in appendix athe name of the module is openpyxl this book uses version of openpyxl it' important that you install this version by running pip install --user - openpyxl=because newer versions of openpyxl are incompatible with the information in this book to test whether it is installed correctlyenter the following into the interactive shellimport openpyxl if the module was correctly installedthis should produce no error messages remember to import the openpyxl module before running the interactive shell examples in this or you'll get nameerrorname 'openpyxlis not defined error you can find the full documentation for openpyxl at readthedocs orgreading excel documents the examples in this will use spreadsheet named example xlsx stored in the root folder you can either create the spreadsheet yourself or download it from