ENH: : Add header Autofilter and optional bold via engine_kwargs in to_excel

[antznette1]

Feature Type

• Adding new functionality to pandas

• Changing existing functionality in pandas

• Removing existing functionality in pandas

Problem Description

• Many users export DataFrames to Excel and then manually:
  • Turn on Autofilter for the header row.
  • Make the header row bold for readability.
• This is repetitive and engine-specific (xlsxwriter/openpyxl). It would be helpful if DataFrame.to_excel() could request these behaviors directly, without requiring users to post-process the file.

Feature Description

• Add support via engine_kwargs to toggle header Autofilter and bold styling in to_excel() for both xlsxwriter and openpyxl engines.

• Proposed usage:
  df.to_excel( "out.xlsx", engine="xlsxwriter", # or "openpyxl" engine_kwargs={ "autofilter_header": True, "header_bold": True, }, )

• Behavior:

  • autofilter_header=True: Apply an Autofilter over the header row and the written data range.
  • header_bold=True: Apply bold font to header row cells if they are not already styled (do not override explicit Styler/formatting).

Alternative Solutions

Users can continue manual post-processing with xlsxwriter/openpyxl directly, but it’s repetitive, adds boilerplate, and is easy to forget.

Additional Context

No response

[AllisonDing]

i can take, but let's first evaluate if this is commonly required by panda users.

[rhshadrach]

Thus far, I believe pandas is consistent in that engine_kwargs are arguments passed to the underlying engine. I do not think we should violate this consistency here.

Autofilters are commonly desired and I believe can be implemented with every engine except maybe xlrd. I'm positive on adding autofilter: bool to the signature of to_excel. For modifying the formatting of the resulting output like bolding the columns, I believe that can be done with the Styler via:

styler.applymap_index(lambda v: "font-weight: bold;", axis="columns").to_excel(...)

I think we should prefer such styling to remain with the styler.

[antznette1]

@rhshadrach
Oh, I see.
I will move autofilter to be a direct parameter, then I'll remove header_bold and use Styler for header formatting instead

[antznette1]

@rhshadrach @AllisonDing
Please can you check out my commit if it meets the requirement