Fix Python – Save list of DataFrames to multisheet Excel spreadsheet

Question 1

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?

Question 2

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)

Question

Answer