Excel and Python for Financial Modelling: Installation Guide
Building powerful models with Microsoft Excel and Python
This article provides an installation guide for running Python through Excel. This is achieved via xlwings, which is a Python library and Excel add-in. It is assumed that Excel and Python are already installed on your computer. For readers that do not have Python yet we have provided a link, which guides the user through the installation process.
Python installation guide
First Python has to be installed. We recommend installing Anaconda, which is a free and open-source distribution already containing all packages for mathematics, science, engineering and data science.
Datacamp has an excellent tutorial on how to install the Python – Anaconda package manager on Microsoft Windows – the tutorial can be found here.
Second, install Python packages pandas and xlwings. To do this open the Anaconda prompt – make sure to run the prompt as an administrator. The code to install them is simple – in the prompt type:
pandas:
conda install pandas
xlwings:
conda install xlwings
This is all that is required to install the pandas and xlwings packages in Python.
VBA installation guide
The last step is for the xlwings add-in to be added to Excel. Open the command prompt (make sure to run this as an administrator) and type:
xlwings addin install
After opening Excel, the xlwings add-in will be shown on the Excel ribbon as per below:
The official xlwings add-in installation guide can be found here.