Save list of DataFrames to multisheet Excel spreadsheet

Question

How can I export a list of DataFrames into one Excel spreadsheet?
The docs for to_excel state:

Notes
If passing an existing ExcelWriter object, then the sheet will be added to the existing workbook. This can be used to save different DataFrames to one workbook

writer = ExcelWriter('output.xlsx')
df1.to_excel(writer, 'sheet1')
df2.to_excel(writer, 'sheet2')
writer.save()

Following this, I thought I could write a function which saves a list of DataFrames to one spreadsheet as follows:

from openpyxl.writer.excel import ExcelWriter
def save_xls(list_dfs, xls_path):
    writer = ExcelWriter(xls_path)
    for n, df in enumerate(list_dfs):
        df.to_excel(writer,'sheet%s' % n)
    writer.save()

However (with a list of two small DataFrames, each of which can save to_excel individually), an exception is raised (Edit: traceback removed):

AttributeError: 'str' object has no attribute 'worksheets'

Presumably I am not calling ExcelWriter correctly, how should I be in order to do this?

Answer 1

You should be using pandas own ExcelWriter class:

from pandas import ExcelWriter
# from pandas.io.parsers import ExcelWriter

Then the save_xls function works as expected:

def save_xls(list_dfs, xls_path):
    with ExcelWriter(xls_path) as writer:
        for n, df in enumerate(list_dfs):
            df.to_excel(writer,'sheet%s' % n)
        writer.save()

Answer 2

In case anyone needs an example using a dictionary of dataframes:

from pandas import ExcelWriter

def save_xls(dict_df, path):
"""
Save a dictionary of dataframes to an excel file, with each dataframe as a separate page
"""

    writer = ExcelWriter(path)
    for key in dict_df:
        dict_df[key].to_excel(writer, key)

    writer.save()

example: save_xls(dict_df = my_dict, path = '~/my_path.xls')

Answer 3

Sometimes there can be issues(Writing an excel file containing unicode), if there are some non supporting character type in the data frame. To overcome it we can use 'xlsxwriter' package as in below case:

for below code:

from pandas import ExcelWriter
import xlsxwriter
writer = ExcelWriter('notes.xlsx')
for key in dict_df:
        data[key].to_excel(writer, key,index=False)
writer.save()

I got the error as "IllegalCharacterError"

The code that worked:

%pip install xlsxwriter
from pandas import ExcelWriter
import xlsxwriter
writer = ExcelWriter('notes.xlsx')
for key in dict_df:
        data[key].to_excel(writer, key,index=False,engine='xlsxwriter')
writer.save()