When a task takes more than a second or two it can be helpful to display something to the user to show them that progress is still being made. If you don’t it can just appear that the Excel is hung because it’s unresponsive until your task is complete.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Python has a variety of UI toolkits that can be used for a progress indicator. They all work mostly in the same way. You create the dialog with the progress indicator, periodically set the progress, and then close the window when your task is complete.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This blog will show you how to display a progress indicator using the pywin32 package. The pywin32 package is sometimes overlooked for building user interface components because it’s not as modern as some other toolkits. If you don’t need a fancy user interface though, it can be good choice as you probably already have it installed! The packages in pywin32 wrap the underlying WIN32 APIs, so it can seem a bit ‘low level’, but it includes a lot of demos to help get you started<\/span>. Take a look in First off, install the pywin32 package if you don’t have it already.<\/p>\n\n\n This actually installs a number of packages: pythonwin, pywin, win32ui, win32api, win32com and others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the demos folder mentioned earlier ( Here’s the code from the pythonwin example:<\/p>\n\n\n This is pretty much what we need. It creates a dialog box containing a progress bar with two buttons, one to increment the progress and another to cancel the dialog box.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We need to make a slight change so that we can increment the progress bar ourselves without the button, and close it after we’re done with it. We’ll remove the OnOK method and add a “progress” property to set the current progress, and add a “close” method to close the dialog. Those changes look like this:<\/p>\n\n\nsite-packages\/pythonwin\/pywin\/Demos.<\/code><\/p>\n\n\n\n\npip install pywin32\n<\/pre><\/div>\n\n\n
site-packages\/pythonwin\/pywin\/Demos<\/code>) you’ll find a file called progressbar.py<\/code>. Exactly what we need! With very little modification we can get this working in Excel and give our users that progress feedback during our long running task.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\nfrom pywin.mfc import dialog\nimport win32ui\nimport win32con\n\ndef MakeDlgTemplate():\n style = (win32con.DS_MODALFRAME |\n win32con.WS_POPUP |\n win32con.WS_VISIBLE |\n win32con.WS_CAPTION |\n win32con.WS_SYSMENU |\n win32con.DS_SETFONT)\n cs = (win32con.WS_CHILD |\n win32con.WS_VISIBLE)\n\n w = 215\n h = 36\n\n dlg = [["Progress bar control example",\n (0, 0, w, h),\n style,\n None,\n (8, "MS Sans Serif")],\n ]\n\n s = win32con.WS_TABSTOP | cs \n\n dlg.append([128,\n "Tick",\n win32con.IDOK,\n (10, h - 18, 50, 14), s | win32con.BS_DEFPUSHBUTTON])\n\n dlg.append([128,\n "Cancel",\n win32con.IDCANCEL,\n (w - 60, h - 18, 50, 14), s | win32con.BS_PUSHBUTTON])\n\n return dlg\n\nclass TestDialog(dialog.Dialog):\n def OnInitDialog(self):\n rc = dialog.Dialog.OnInitDialog(self)\n self.pbar = win32ui.CreateProgressCtrl()\n self.pbar.CreateWindow (win32con.WS_CHILD |\n win32con.WS_VISIBLE,\n (10, 10, 310, 24),\n self, 1001)\n # self.pbar.SetStep (5)\n self.progress = 0\n self.pincr = 5\n return rc\n\n def OnOK(self):\n # NB: StepIt wraps at the end if you increment past the upper limit!\n # self.pbar.StepIt()\n self.progress = self.progress + self.pincr\n if self.progress > 100:\n self.progress = 100\n if self.progress <= 100:\n self.pbar.SetPos(self.progress)\n\ndef demo(modal = 0):\n d = TestDialog (MakeDlgTemplate())\n if modal:\n d.DoModal()\n else:\n d.CreateWindow ()\n\nif __name__=='__main__':\n demo(1)\n\n<\/pre><\/div>\n\n\n