title: Ouputting (clickable) hyperlinks to a spreadsheet with Python pandas.to_excel()
body: <p>I have a dataframe in which one column is all hyperlinks (eg, <a href="http://example.com" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://example.com</a>). I have managed to make these links render as html inside Jupyter Notebook:</p>
  
  <pre><code>from IPython.display import HTML
  df["URL"] = df["URL"].apply(lambda x: '&lt;a href="{}"&gt;{}&lt;/a&gt;'.format(x,x))
  df = HTML(df.to_html(escape=False))
  df
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>But I cannot get these links written to an Excel (or ODS) spreadsheet as html rather than text. In the above, <code>df</code> become a <code>IPython.core.display.HTML</code> object, without pandas's <code>to_excel()</code>.</p>
  
  <p>When I convert the individual cells to <code>IPython.core.display.HTML</code> with <code>lambda x: HTML('&lt;a href="{}"&gt;{}&lt;/a&gt;'.format(x,x))</code> and then call <code>to_excel</code> on the DataFrame, I get the Exception:</p>
  
  <p><code>Unexpected data type &lt;class 'IPython.core.display.HTML'&gt;</code></p>