How to create a password protect copy of the excel file used with xlwings?

[Rachid70]

OS (e.g. Windows 10 or macOS Sierra)

Versions of xlwings, Excel and Python (e.g. 0.11.8, Office 365, Python 3.7)

Describe your issue (incl. Traceback!)

# Your traceback here

Include a minimal code sample to reproduce the issue (and attach a sample workbook if required!)

# Your code here

[fzumstein]

At the moment, you would have to go via the ".api" workaround:

import xlwings as xw

book = xw.Book()
book.api.SaveAs(r'C:\path\to\withpassword.xlsx', Password='password')

[Rachid70]

Yes it worked for me too. Thank you
Can I make the file read only in a similar way?

[fzumstein]

Try this:

import xlwings as xw
from xlwings.constants import FileAccess

book = xw.books.active

book.api.ChangeFileAccess(Mode=FileAccess.xlReadOnly)

[evanrittenhouse]

Hi - would this be possible with MacOS? It uses appscript, not pywin32, so the api.SaveAs method doesn't work and I haven't been able to find an equivalent!

@fzumstein

[fzumstein]

It's a bit harder to workaround on macOS due to the path handling, but it would be trivial to build it in. Basically, you'd have to provide the password argument here:

https://github.com/xlwings/xlwings/blob/master/xlwings/_xlmac.py#L321-L333

I'll try to include support for this in one of the next releases.

[evanrittenhouse]

@fzumstein thank you so much!! I've been trying to do it myself, but got as far as trying to inject XML tags into the underlying .zip structure. When that still allowed read-only access, I gave up haha. I never knew encrypting a workbook would be so hard...

[vishalkumarpatel1610]

@fzumstein

`import xlwings as xw

book = xw.Book()
book.api.SaveAs(r'C:\path\to\withpassword.xlsx', Password='password')`

Do we have any function for this now? or still be using a workaround? Also what if I have already files and want to save as with a new name and make them password protected?

[fzumstein]

See https://docs.xlwings.org/en/latest/api/book.html#xlwings.Book.save

[vishalkumarpatel1610]

@fzumstein it works fine - but it opens up an excel file right away after the execution.