Question

So I have an excel spreadsheet that has a specific column I want to sort the spreadsheet by. The column has 3 different combinations of starting letters, B,C,E. I want to order by B then E then all the rows starting with C. I do need to sort the whole table from the column

Anyone know how to do this in Python?

Answer 1

Read your sheet into a list of rows lst, the column index of your specific column being index.

import xlrd
wb = xlrd.open_workbook('myworkbook.xls')
sh = wb.sheet_by_index(0)
lst = [sh.row(n) for n in xrange(sh.nrows)]
searchdict = dict(B=1, E=2, C=3)
lst.sort(key=lambda row: searchdict.get(row[index][0], 4))

The [0] in the last line accesses the first character of your field, which is looked up in a dictionary then. The default value of 4 in the dict.get arguments puts all not fitting lines to the end of your new list. Not tested in detail, but should get you the idea.