ENH: Adding 'hidden=True' to 'to_excel', or efficiently hiding some excel tabs?

I need to hide some excel tabs in an output from to_excel, and I’d like to do that with a parameter like hidden=True, but no such parameter exists. The only solution I can find is hiding the sheet manually with openpyxl, but this is prohibitively slow for large files.

My StackOverflow question on this is unanswered, which suggests I’m out of luck.

Testing openpyxl showed that we can’t save .xlsxs without at least one visible tab, so it looks like this would only work like so:

writer = pd.ExcelWriter(filename, engine='xlsxwriter') 
with writer:
    df.to_excel(writer, sheet_name='df')
    df.to_excel(writer, sheet_name='2nd tab')

Would adding hidden=True to to_excel be practical?

[jmcnamara]

My issue is solved but I still think hidden=True is more elegant and beginner friendly than his answer, although I don’t know what technical complications that might involve.

There are some potential issues with this proposal. The first is that any parameter added to to_excel() has to be supported by all the Excel engines. In addition, there are a lot of parameters and methods that are exposed by XlsxWriter and OpenPyXL (and xlwt) and it wouldn’t be feasible to add them all to the to_excel() interface (in fact it probably already has too many). Finally, there is a technical issue where hiding the active worksheet without activating another worksheet would generate a “corrupt” Excel file that would open with errors.

So my vote is to close this as can’t fix/won’t fix. Apologies in advance.

[rhshadrach]

I don’t think there is any further action required here - @chrisjdixon thanks for the report! If you feel something is still unresolved, simply reply here and can reopen.