Threading and Multiprocessing

Added in version 0.13.0.

Threading

While xlwings is not technically thread safe, it’s still easy to use it in threads as long as you have at least v0.13.0 and stick to a simple rule: Do not pass xlwings objects to threads. This rule isn’t a requirement on macOS, but it’s still recommended if you want your programs to be cross-platform.

Consider the following example that will NOT work:

import threading
from queue import Queue
import xlwings as xw

num_threads = 4


def write_to_workbook():
    while True:
        myrange = q.get()
        myrange.value = myrange.address
        print(myrange.address)
        q.task_done()


q = Queue()

for i in range(num_threads):
    t = threading.Thread(target=write_to_workbook)
    t.daemon = True
    t.start()

for cell in ['A1', 'A2', 'A3', 'A4', 'A5', 'A6', 'A7', 'A8', 'A9', 'A10']:
    # THIS DOESN'T WORK - passing xlwings objects to threads will fail!
    myrange = xw.Book('Book1.xlsx').sheets[0].range(cell)
    q.put(myrange)

q.join()

To make it work, you simply have to fully qualify the cell reference in the thread instead of passing a Book object:

import threading
from queue import Queue
import xlwings as xw

num_threads = 4


def write_to_workbook():
    while True:
        cell_ = q.get()
        xw.Book('Book1.xlsx').sheets[0].range(cell_).value = cell_
        print(cell_)
        q.task_done()


q = Queue()

for i in range(num_threads):
    t = threading.Thread(target=write_to_workbook)
    t.daemon = True
    t.start()

for cell in ['A1', 'A2', 'A3', 'A4', 'A5', 'A6', 'A7', 'A8', 'A9', 'A10']:
    q.put(cell)

q.join()

Multiprocessing

Note

Multiprocessing is only supported on Windows!

The same rules apply to multiprocessing as for threading, here’s a working example:

from multiprocessing import Pool
import xlwings as xw


def write_to_workbook(cell):
    xw.Book('Book1.xlsx').sheets[0].range(cell).value = cell
    print(cell)


if __name__ == '__main__':
    with Pool(4) as p:
        p.map(write_to_workbook,
              ['A1', 'A2', 'A3', 'A4', 'A5', 'A6', 'A7', 'A8', 'A9', 'A10'])