I have built a couple basic workflows using XML tools on top of XLSX workbooks that are mapped to an XML schema. You would enter data into the spreadsheet, export the XML and I had some scripts that would then work with the data.
Now I'm trying to eliminate that step and build a more integrated and portable tool that others could use easily by moving from XSLT/XQuery to Python. I would still like to use Excel for the data entry, but have the Python script read the XLSX file directly.
I found a bunch of easy to use libraries to read from Excel but they need to explicitly state what cells the data is in, like range('A1:C2') etc. The useful thing about using the XML maps was that users could resize or even move tables to fit different rows and rename sheets. Is their a library that would let me select tables as units?
Another approach I tried was to just uncompress the XLSX and just parse the XML directly. The problem with that is that our data is quite complex (taking up to 30-50 sheets) and parsing that in the uncompressed XLSX structure is really daunting. I did find my XML schema within the uncompressed XLSX, so is there any way to reformat the data into this schema outside of Excel? (basically what Excel does when I save a workbook as an .xml file)
No comments:
Post a Comment