title: Excel Interacting With Python
body: <p><strong>What tools have you seen for passing data into and out of MS-Excel?</strong></p>
  
  <p>These is a request for advice about choice of tools, and for good technical articles available online. It's not a question about named methods and objects in wxpython.</p>
  
  <p><strong>Background:</strong></p>
  
  <p>I have the job or retiring or euthanatising a bunch of user-developed Microsoft Excel applications, and the end state is that the data storage and retrieval, and the data processing, will all reside and run on our company's servers, running on an existing company-wide platform of Python apps.</p>
  
  <p>Some of these Excel workbooks will live on, calling data from our servers via Python apps - which will look a lot like the screens and menus of the existing Excel add-ins - and Excel will still be used for whatever local data-noodling our users choose to do. But the heavy lifting is moving to python on our servers, where we have a substantial codebase of python objects and tools.</p>
  
  <p>We have a free hand in designing the tools and interfaces to do all this. </p>
  
  <p>So the questions are: </p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>What have you seen?  </li>
  <li>What tools are out there?</li>
  <li>What pitfalls and pratfalls have you discovered?</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>The more we take out of Excel and VBA and run on servers, the happier I'll be. A lot of the VBA code and cell-based formula logic I'm looking at should have been retired years ago, and running it in a fragile desktop tool has obvious operational risks.</p>
  
  <p>Note that we're going a bit further than 'Here, let me open a new Excel Worksheet, paste and format some data, and save the file' - we need to <em>interact</em> with existing Excel worksheets, open and running in existing sessions of Excel.exe.</p>