Deactivate formula evaluation in openpyxl?

[PS]

Hi all,

I posted this a while ago on SO, too, but no luck, maybe someone here will be able to help?

Any pointers are much appreciated!

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I am creating some Excel spreadsheets from pandas DataFrames using the pandas.ExcelWriter.

Issue:

- For some string input, this creates broken .xlsx files that need to be repaired. (*problem with some content* --- *removed formula*, cf error msg below)

- I assume this happens because Excel interprets the cell content not as a string, but a formula which it cannot parse, e.g. when a string value starts with "="

Question:

- When using xlsxwriter as engine, I can solve this issue by setting the argument `options = {"strings_to_formulas" : False }`

- Is there a similar argument for openpyxl?


Troubleshooting:
- I found the `data_only` argument to Workbook, but it only seems to apply to reading files / I cannot get it to work with ExcelWriter().

- Not all output values are strings / I'd like to avoid converting all output to str

- Could not find an applicable question on here

Any hints are much appreciated, thanks!

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Error messages:

*We found a problem with some content in 'file.xlsx'. Do you want us to try to recover as much as we can? If you trust the source of this workbook, click Yes*

The log after opening says:

*[...] summary="Following is a list of removed records:"><removedRecord>Removed Records: Formula from /xl/worksheets/sheet1.xml part [...]*

Code

import pandas
excelout = pandas.ExcelWriter(output_file, engine = "openpyxl")
df.to_excel(excelout)
excelout.save()

Versions:

pandas @0.24.2
openpyxl @2.5.6

Excel 2016 for Mac (but replicates on Win)