Quick Fix: Python raises the ImportError: No module named 'xlsxwriter' when it cannot find the library xlsxwriter . The most frequent source of this error is that you haven’t installed xlsxwriter explicitly with pip install xlsxwriter . Alternatively, you may have different Python versions on your computer, and xlsxwriter is not installed for the particular version you’re using.

In particular, you can try any of the following commands, depending on your concrete environment and installation needs:

💡 If you have only one version of Python installed:
pip install xlsxwriter
💡 If you have Python 3 (and, possibly, other versions) installed:
pip3 install xlsxwriter
💡 If you don't have PIP or it doesn't work
python -m pip install xlsxwriter
python3 -m pip install xlsxwriter
💡 If you have Linux and you need to fix permissions (any one):
sudo pip3 install xlsxwriter
pip3 install xlsxwriter --user
💡 If you have Linux with apt
sudo apt install xlsxwriter
💡 If you have Windows and you have set up the py alias
py -m pip install xlsxwriter
💡 If you have Anaconda
conda install -c anaconda xlsxwriter
💡 If you have Jupyter Notebook
!pip install xlsxwriter
!pip3 install xlsxwriter

Problem Formulation

You’ve just learned about the awesome capabilities of the xlsxwriter library and you want to try it out, so you start your code with the following statement:

import xlsxwriter

This is supposed to import the xlsxwriter library into your (virtual) environment . However, it only throws the following ImportError: No module named xlsxwriter :

>>> import xlsxwriter
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<pyshell#6>", line 1, in <module>
    import xlsxwriter
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'xlsxwriter'

Solution Idea 1: Install Library xlsxwriter

The most likely reason is that Python doesn’t provide xlsxwriter in its standard library. You need to install it first!

Before being able to import the xlsxwriter module, you need to install it using Python’s package manager pip . Make sure pip is installed on your machine.

To fix this error, you can run the following command in your Windows shell:

$ pip install xlsxwriter

This simple command installs xlsxwriter in your virtual environment on Windows, Linux, and MacOS. It assumes that your pip version is updated. If it isn’t, use the following two commands in your terminal, command line, or shell (there’s no harm in doing it anyways):

$ python -m pip install --upgrade pip
$ pip install xlsxwriter

💡 Note : Don’t copy and paste the $ symbol. This is just to illustrate that you run it in your shell/terminal/command line.

Solution Idea 2: Fix the Path

The error might persist even after you have installed the xlsxwriter library. This likely happens because pip is installed but doesn’t reside in the path you can use. Although pip may be installed on your system the script is unable to locate it. Therefore, it is unable to install the library using pip in the correct path.

To fix the problem with the path in Windows follow the steps given next.

Step 1 : Open the folder where you installed Python by opening the command prompt and typing where python

• The ModuleNotFoundError may appear due to relative imports . You can learn everything about relative imports and how to create your own module in this article .
• You may have mixed up Python and pip versions on your machine. In this case, to install xlsxwriter for Python 3, you may want to try python3 -m pip install xlsxwriter or even pip3 install xlsxwriter instead of pip install xlsxwriter
• If you face this issue server-side, you may want to try the command pip install --user xlsxwriter
• If you’re using Ubuntu, you may want to try this command: sudo apt install xlsxwriter
• You can also check out this article to learn more about possible problems that may lead to an error when importing a library.

Understanding the “import” Statement

import xlsxwriter

In Python, the import statement serves two main purposes:

• Search the module by its name, load it, and initialize it.
• Define a name in the local namespace within the scope of the import statement. This local name is then used to reference the accessed module throughout the code.

What’s the Difference Between ImportError and ModuleNotFoundError?

What’s the difference between ImportError and ModuleNotFoundError ?

Python defines an error hierarchy , so some error classes inherit from other error classes. In our case, the ModuleNotFoundError is a subclass of the ImportError class.

You can see this in this screenshot from the docs :

The following video shows you how to import a function from another folder —doing it the wrong way often results in the ModuleNotFoundError :

How to Fix “ModuleNotFoundError: No module named ‘xlsxwriter'” in PyCharm

If you create a new Python project in PyCharm and try to import the xlsxwriter library, it’ll raise the following error message:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:/Users/.../main.py", line 1, in <module>
    import xlsxwriter
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'xlsxwriter'
Process finished with exit code 1

The reason is that each PyCharm project, per default, creates a virtual environment in which you can install custom Python modules. But the virtual environment is initially empty—even if you’ve already installed xlsxwriter on your computer!

Here’s a screenshot exemplifying this for the pandas library. It’ll look similar for xlsxwriter .

You can also manually install a new library such as xlsxwriter in PyCharm using the following procedure:

• Open File > Settings > Project from the PyCharm menu.
• Select your current project.
• Click the Python Interpreter tab within your project tab.
• Click the small + symbol to add a new library to the project.
• Now type in the library to be installed, in your example Pandas, and click Install Package .
• Wait for the installation to terminate and close all popup windows.

Here’s an analogous example:

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