Examples

Below we go through a few basic examples on how to use Excelbind. You can find more examples in the examples folder in the Github source repository.

Exposing python functions

To get started, just import the excelbind library in your code and then use the excelbind.function decorator to mark the functions you want to export. The Excelbind library is automatically part of the builtin libraries in the embedded interpreter that Excelbind uses, so you don’t need to install any packages yourself. You can simply write:

import excelbind

@excelbind.function
def add(x, y):
    return x + y

As described in the Type conversion, it is better to include type hints in your function when possibly. If you add comments to your code, Excelbind will also automatically pick these up and expose them in the function wizard:

import excelbind

@excelbind.function
def add(x: float, y: float) -> float:
""" Adds two numbers together!

:param x: The first number
:param y: The second number
:return: The sum!
"""
    return x + y

You can easily combine Excelbind with other libraries such as numpy:

import excelbind
import numpy as np

@excelbind.function
def inv(x: np.ndarray) -> np.ndarray:
    """Matrix inversion

    :param x: An invertible matrix
    :return: The inverse
    """
    return np.linalg.inv(x)

Execute python code directly from Excel

Excelbind lets you execute python code directly in Excel using the excelbind.execute_python function.

The function wraps your input code in a simple python function which takes up to 10 arguments. The arguments can be referenced in the function using the names arg0, arg1, …, arg9. The function accept any of the auto discoverable types such as floats, strings, lists and dictionaries.

You can also perform more advanced operations inside the execute_python function, such as import libraries, open files etc. The execution happens inside a local python function, so import statements or local variables in one function will not affect other functions.