This is a lightweight XLSX writer with emphasis on minimizing memory usage. It's also really fast.
from xlsxlite.writer import XLSXBook
book = XLSXBook()
sheet1 = book.add_sheet("People")
sheet1.append_row("Name", "Email", "Age")
sheet1.append_row("Jim", "jim@acme.com", 45)
book.finalize(to_file="simple.xlsx")The benchmarking test writes rows with 10 cells of random string data to a single sheet workbook. The table below gives the times in seconds (lower is better) to write a spreadsheet with the given number of rows, and includes xlxswriter and openpyxl for comparison.
| Implementation | 100,000 rows | 1,000,000 rows |
|---|---|---|
| openpyxl | 43.5 | 469.1 |
| openpyxl + lxml | 21.1 | 226.3 |
| xlsxwriter | 17.2 | 186.2 |
| xlsxlite | 1.9 | 19.2 |
This library is for projects which need to generate large spreadsheets, quickly, for the purposes of data exchange, and so it intentionally only supports a tiny subset of SpreadsheetML specification:
- No styling or themes
- Only strings, numbers, booleans and dates are supported cell types
If you need to do anything fancier then take a look at xlxswriter and openpyxl.
To run all tests:
uv run pytest xlsxlite -s