xlwings Newsletter #24

Guido van Rossum joins Microsoft and other news

November 23, 2020

Guide van Rossum, the creator of Python, "decided that retirement was boring" and joined Microsoft: Twitter
"Excel: Why using Microsoft's tool caused Covid-19 results to be lost": BBC News
Python 3.9: Cool New Features for You to Try: RealPython
Anaconda Individual Edition 2020.11 is out with xlwings 0.20.8 on board: Anaconda

Added proper support for Excel tables
Get and set the text of shapes like Text Boxes or Rectangles via myshape.text
Easy export to PDF via mybook.to_pdf()
Better image quality when working with Matplotlib plots
You can now get the calling xlwings range object of a UDF by providing "caller" as an argument, see: https://docs.xlwings.org/en/stable/udfs.html#the-caller-argument
Many bug fixes including:
- Hiding the app on macOS works now
- Preventing zombie processes when calling app.quit() on Windows
- The ShowConsole setting now works properly also with Conda environments
- Workbooks stored on OneDrive don't cause troubles anymore.

pandas DataFrames can easily be synced with Excel tables via mytable.update(df)
xlwings Reports now supports Excel tables (useful as dynamic chart source and to style tables with striped rows), see: https://docs.xlwings.org/en/stable/reports.html#excel-tables
xlwings Reports now allows you to make use of template placeholders in the text part of shapes like Text Boxes or Rectangles, see: https://docs.xlwings.org/en/stable/reports.html#shape-text

, our Git-based version control system for Excel workbooks, is now also tracking:

CustomUI: This is the XML file that defines the layout of ribbon add-ins. The screenshot below shows a recent change in the xlwings ribbon.
Cell notes and comments.