---
layout: post
title:  "wbc: generating xlsx"
author: jadudm
draft: true
# commit: https://github.com/jadudm/pytbl/tree/527b16bdecbf73b874103922cf3038a1f2c1e1c7
tags:
  - cc-sa
  - wbc
  - blog
  - "2025"
  - 2025-09
date: 2025-09-16
---

Generating Excel workbooks in code is hard. By this, I mean that writing code that outputs an XLSX document involves a lot of details (contents, formatting, data validations), and you have to learn a lot about XLSX in order to do it right. 

**But Matt: who would ever want to generate Excel documents from code?**

It turns out, most everyone who works with data. Also, *every government everywhere*. Spreadsheets are the lifeblood of governments around the world. Also, financial institutions. And researchers. And... and...

## a workbook "compiler"

For a number of months (years?), I've been thinking about writing a workbook "compiler." In technical terms, a compiler transforms one language or representation of content to another while preserving the intention of the programmer. In this case, I want a way to express a workbook in one language (say, a textual representation like JSON) and I want to transform it to another representation (an XLSX document, or spreadsheet).

For example, I'd like to be able to say write something like this:

```json
{
  "workbook": "my first spreadsheet",
  "sheets": [
    {
      "name": "empty sheet"
    }
  ]
}
```

and run a program that consumes that textual file, producing as output the XLSX document.