Using Python with VBA to automate Microsoft Excel Workflows

In this age of Data, python has become the most widely adopted language by many developers around the globe. This means that there are many potential libraries sitting there waiting to be utilized.

While python has recently gained the ethos for being the first choice to analyze data and has a very wide spectrum of applications spanning low to heavy usage for many tasks; Microsoft Excel has a history of, and in most cases still is an inevitable tool used to analyze/munge/visualize data.

Imagine if we could utilise the open-source libraries which are available in python for automating our workflows in Excel; It would make our lives super-convenient! Standing on the shoulders of the giant open-source python community which has thousands of packages for many different use-cases, we could utilize their functionality in Excel.

I had one such requirement which I would like to discuss below and with the help of xlwingsI was able to integrate my Excel front-end with python backend through VBA and automate a substantially cumbersome manual process to happen at the click of a button!

This post is therefore mainly aimed at showing you how you could leverage this powerful python package called xlwings for communicating with Excel through VBA and in the process automate some tasks. There could be VBA workarounds for python code but for my particular usecase I wasn’t able to circumvent the need for python because VBA couldn’t do some tasks which a few python libraries like nsepy are capable of doing.

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