Installing xlutils alongside xlrd and xlwt in ArcPy install folder to facilitate copying Excel worksheets?

Question

Whenever possible I avoid installing Python libraries other than those installed with ArcPy by the ArcGIS Desktop 10.x and ArcGIS Pro installs but occasionally I have for ReportLab, gdal, pyodbc and I usually find several ways are suggested and I only get them working after some experimentation.

I would like to be able to copy a worksheet from one Excel (*.xls) spreadsheet, created using TableToExcel in ArcPy, to another Excel (*.xls) spreadsheet (also created by ArcPy), and the only technique that I found that looks promising for doing this is in this answer to Writing to existing workbook using xlwt

That technique commences by importing xlrd, xlwt and xlutils using the re-ordered lines below:

from xlrd import open_workbook
from xlwt import easyxf
from xlutils.copy import copy

When I run them using IDLE from Python 2.7.10 that was installed with ArcGIS 10.4.1 for Desktop I get this error which indicates that xlrd and xlwt are available but xutils is not.

Traceback (most recent call last): File "C:\Fyfe\xutilsTest.py", line 3, in from xlutils.copy import copy ImportError: No module named xlutils.copy

This matches what I see when I look in C:\Python27\ArcGIS10.4\Lib\site-packages where xlrd and xlwt folders can be seen but no xlutils.

Is there a simple process that will let me download a folder of Python code for xlutils and copy it into the same folder to make import xlutils just work?

Installing third party python libraries in ArcGIS location gives me some hints about what may need to be done but that Q&A seems to be more understandable by someone who develops using a higher Python:ArcPy ratio than I do.

Answer 1

You can install from pypi using pip:

pip install --user xlutils

http://pythonhosted.org/xlutils/installation.html

If pip.exe is not in your PATH use the full path to to pip.exe or replace pip with python -m pip

Answer 2

@Luke's answer filled the key steps to a solution.

A few extra things that I had to do to my vanilla ArcGIS install of ArcPy were:

1. Added ;C:\Python27\ArcGIS10.4 to my Path so that python was recognized as a command
2. Used python -m pip install --user xlutils which I ran in C:\users\PolyGeo
3. When the xlutils site-package still did not import I went to C:\Users\PolyGeo\AppData\Roaming\Python\Python27\site-packages and cut two folders xlutils and xlutils-2.0.0.dist-info
4. I then pasted those two folders into C:\Python27\ArcGIS10.4\Lib\site-packages

I was then able to import xlutils.

As commented by @Luke the steps above may not have been necessary:

You should never need to cut and paste pip installed packages/modules. I use the --user flag as I don't have admin rights to install directly to the python installation directory, but you can leave that out to install directly to C:\Python27\ArcGIS10.4. Also, the user site packages directory C:\users\username\python27 only gets added to your python path if it exists when python starts. So you would need to restart IDLE to get python to register the newly installed module. You would only need to do this once, i.e the first time you ever install using the --user flag.