Styling individual cells in Excel output files created with pandas

The Python Data Analysis Library pandas provides basic but reliable Excel in- and output. However, more advanced features for writing Excel files are missing. Some of these advanced things, like conditional formatting can be achieved with XlsxWriter (see also
Improving Pandas’ Excel Output). However, sometimes it is
necessary to set styles like font or background colors on individual cells on the “Python side”. In this scenario,
XlsxWriter won’t work, since “XlsxWriter and Pandas provide very little support for formatting the output data from a dataframe apart from default formatting such as the header and index cells and any cells that contain dates of datetimes.”

To achieve setting styles on individual cells on the Python side, I wrote a small extension for pandas and put it on github, along with some examples. It comes in quite handy, for example when you are running complicated data validation routines (which you probably don’t want to implement in VBA) and want to highlight the validation results by coloring
individual cells in the output Excel sheets.