Is there a way to auto-adjust Excel column widths with pandas.ExcelWriter?

Inspired by user6178746's answer, I have the following:

# Given a dict of dataframes, for example:
# dfs = {'gadgets': df_gadgets, 'widgets': df_widgets}

writer = pd.ExcelWriter(filename, engine='xlsxwriter')
for sheetname, df in dfs.items():  # loop through `dict` of dataframes
    df.to_excel(writer, sheet_name=sheetname)  # send df to writer
    worksheet = writer.sheets[sheetname]  # pull worksheet object
    for idx, col in enumerate(df):  # loop through all columns
        series = df[col]
        max_len = max((
            series.astype(str).map(len).max(),  # len of largest item
            len(str(series.name))  # len of column name/header
            )) + 1  # adding a little extra space
        worksheet.set_column(idx, idx, max_len)  # set column width
writer.save()

I'm posting this because I just ran into the same issue and found that the official documentation for Xlsxwriter and pandas still have this functionality listed as unsupported. I hacked together a solution that solved the issue i was having. I basically just iterate through each column and use worksheet.set_column to set the column width == the max length of the contents of that column.

One important note, however. This solution does not fit the column headers, simply the column values. That should be an easy change though if you need to fit the headers instead. Hope this helps someone :)

import pandas as pd
import sqlalchemy as sa
import urllib


read_server = 'serverName'
read_database = 'databaseName'

read_params = urllib.quote_plus("DRIVER={SQL Server};SERVER="+read_server+";DATABASE="+read_database+";TRUSTED_CONNECTION=Yes")
read_engine = sa.create_engine("mssql+pyodbc:///?odbc_connect=%s" % read_params)

#Output some SQL Server data into a dataframe
my_sql_query = """ SELECT * FROM dbo.my_table """
my_dataframe = pd.read_sql_query(my_sql_query,con=read_engine)

#Set destination directory to save excel.
xlsFilepath = r'H:\my_project' + "\\" + 'my_file_name.xlsx'
writer = pd.ExcelWriter(xlsFilepath, engine='xlsxwriter')

#Write excel to file using pandas to_excel
my_dataframe.to_excel(writer, startrow = 1, sheet_name='Sheet1', index=False)

#Indicate workbook and worksheet for formatting
workbook = writer.book
worksheet = writer.sheets['Sheet1']

#Iterate through each column and set the width == the max length in that column. A padding length of 2 is also added.
for i, col in enumerate(my_dataframe.columns):
    # find length of column i
    column_len = my_dataframe[col].astype(str).str.len().max()
    # Setting the length if the column header is larger
    # than the max column value length
    column_len = max(column_len, len(col)) + 2
    # set the column length
    worksheet.set_column(i, i, column_len)
writer.save()

There is a nice package that I started to use recently called StyleFrame.

it gets DataFrame and lets you to style it very easily...

by default the columns width is auto-adjusting.

for example:

from StyleFrame import StyleFrame
import pandas as pd

df = pd.DataFrame({'aaaaaaaaaaa': [1, 2, 3], 
                   'bbbbbbbbb': [1, 1, 1],
                   'ccccccccccc': [2, 3, 4]})
excel_writer = StyleFrame.ExcelWriter('example.xlsx')
sf = StyleFrame(df)
sf.to_excel(excel_writer=excel_writer, row_to_add_filters=0,
            columns_and_rows_to_freeze='B2')
excel_writer.save()

you can also change the columns width:

sf.set_column_width(columns=['aaaaaaaaaaa', 'bbbbbbbbb'],
                    width=35.3)

UPDATE 1

In version 1.4 best_fit argument was added to StyleFrame.to_excel. See the documentation.

UPDATE 2

Here's a sample of code that works for StyleFrame 3.x.x

from styleframe import StyleFrame
import pandas as pd

columns = ['aaaaaaaaaaa', 'bbbbbbbbb', 'ccccccccccc', ]
df = pd.DataFrame(data={
        'aaaaaaaaaaa': [1, 2, 3, ],
        'bbbbbbbbb': [1, 1, 1, ],
        'ccccccccccc': [2, 3, 4, ],
    }, columns=columns,
)
excel_writer = StyleFrame.ExcelWriter('example.xlsx')
sf = StyleFrame(df)
sf.to_excel(
    excel_writer=excel_writer, 
    best_fit=columns,
    columns_and_rows_to_freeze='B2', 
    row_to_add_filters=0,
)
excel_writer.save()