Write Excel Cell Comment using Python on Linux?

Question

I am using Python in a Linux (Ubuntu) environment.

How do I go about writing a comment into a cell in an Excel file (say,MyFile.xls)?

I know that it is possible to write values. Yet, how do I go about writing a comment?

Too bad. .xlsx is just XML files in a zip archive, and Python knows how to deal with both of those. .xls is much harder. — Mark Ransom
– Mark Ransom, Commented May 23, 2011 at 18:04
Every cell has its contents; yet, in addition to the actual contents, every cell can contain a comment. my question was, how do I get (from within python) to write a comment for some cell? — user3262424
– user3262424, Commented May 23, 2011 at 19:03
John Machin occasionally visits SO, and he can probably confirm one way or the other; but as far as I'm aware, xlrd/xlwt don't handle cell comments. Comments aren't simple to handle, as they can contain rich, formatted text; and the structures within the .xls file changed quite dramatically between BIFF5 and BIFF8... adding to the complexities of handling them. — Mark Baker
– Mark Baker, Commented May 23, 2011 at 21:01

Jason Sundram · Accepted Answer · 2013-03-12 01:45:18Z

3

On Windows (with Excel installed) you could use COM from Python: this class wraps it nicely for you.

But on Linux, you'll need to use xlwt.

Jason Sundram

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answered Jul 7, 2011 at 6:31

Michael Dillon

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Comments

Bram · Accepted Answer · 2012-04-11 18:15:05Z

1

I'm looking into this myself and found https://bitbucket.org/ericgazoni/openpyxl/wiki/Home . It is a new library that allows editing xlsx files. I'm not sure if it allows editing comments though.

answered Apr 11, 2012 at 18:15

Bram

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