title: Can Pandas read and modify a single Excel file worksheet (tab) without modifying the rest of the file?
body: <p>Many spreadsheets have formulas and formatting that Python tools for reading and writing Excel files cannot faithfully reproduce. That means that any file I want to create programmatically must be something I basically create from scratch, and then other Excel files (with the aforementioned sophistication) have to refer to that file (which creates a variety of other dependency issues).</p>
  
  <p>My understanding of Excel file 'tabs' is that they're actually just a collection of XML files. Well, is it possible to use pandas (or one of the underlying read/write engines such as xlsxwriter or openpyxl to modify just one of the tabs, leaving other tabs (with more wicked stuff in there) intact?</p>
  
  <p>EDIT: I'll try to further articulate the problem with an example.</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>Excel Sheet test.xlsx has four tabs (aka worksheets): Sheet1, Sheet2, Sheet3, Sheet4</li>
  <li>I read Sheet3 into a DataFrame (let's call it df) using pandas.read_excel()</li>
  <li>Sheet1 and Sheet2 contain formulas, graphs, and various formatting that neither openpyxl nor xlrd can successfully parse, and Sheet4 contains other data. I don't want to touch those tabs at all.</li>
  <li>Sheet2 actually has some references to cells on Sheet3</li>
  <li>I make some edits to df and now want to write it back to sheet3, leaving the other sheets untouched (and the references to it from other worksheets in the workbook intact)</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>Can I do that and, if so, how?</p>