Copying a worksheet with xlwings and python

Question

I have been using xlwings in Python, but have not been able to figure out how to copy a worksheet. I want to treat a particular worksheet as a template, and copy that worksheet each time before making modifications.

I am using version 0.11.4 of xlwings. If such functionality is not built in, I am okay with going outside of xlwings to use pywin32 functions in order to accomplish this.

Answer 1

After poking around in several places and reading the pywin32 documentation, I found a solution to copy the worksheet:

import xlwings as xw
wb = xw.Book('filename.xlsx')
sheet = wb.sheets['Sheet1']

#copy within the same sheet
sheet.api.Copy(Before=sheet.api)

#copy to a new workbook
sheet.api.Copy()

#copy a third time at the beginning of the sheets
sheet2 = wb.sheets['sheet1 (2)']
sheet.api.Copy(Before=sheet2.api)

#copy to an existing workbook by putting it in front of a worksheet object
sheet.api.Copy(before=existingSheet.api)

This does go outside of the native functionality provided by xlwings. Because xlwings is a wrapper around pywin32, the .api() call allows access to those pywin32 functions that are undocumented in xlwings.

Also note that the 'After' command does not work within the worksheet; it will open a new workbook with the sheet copied. This shouldn't pose too big of an issue, as I believe the indexes can be reordered if needed.