Engines available for to_excel function in pandas

Question

Whenever we save a dataframe to an excel file (.xlsx) in pandas using to_excel function, we are given an option to specify the engine using which we want can complete the process. My question is what all are the engines available for this?. For e.g. one engine is "xlsxwriter"; similarly what are the other options available?

Answer 1

Pandas defines default writers for Excel, see pandas/io/excel/_util.py:

def _get_default_writer(ext):
    """
    Return the default writer for the given extension.
    Parameters
    ----------
    ext : str
        The excel file extension for which to get the default engine.
    Returns
    -------
    str
        The default engine for the extension.
    """
    _default_writers = {
        "xlsx": "openpyxl",
        "xlsm": "openpyxl",
        "xls": "xlwt",
        "ods": "odf",
    }
    xlsxwriter = import_optional_dependency(
        "xlsxwriter", raise_on_missing=False, on_version="warn"
    )
    if xlsxwriter:
        _default_writers["xlsx"] = "xlsxwriter"
    return _default_writers[ext]

So the default for extension xlsx will be xlsxwriter, if you have the module installed, otherwise openpyxl.