Remove default formatting in header when converting pandas DataFrame to excel sheet

This is something that has been answered and re-answered time and time again because the answer keeps changing with updates to pandas. I tried some of the solutions I found here and elsewhere online and none of them have worked for me on the current version of pandas. Does anyone know the current, March 2019, pandas 0.24.2, fix for removing the default styling that a DataFrame gives to its header when converting it to an excel sheet? Simply using xlsxwriter to overwrite the styling does not work because of an issue with precedence.

Answer

Based largely on an example provided in the Xlsxwriter Docs (link here), the fully reproducible example below removes the default pandas header format in pandas 0.24.2. Of note is that in df.to_excel(), I’m changing the header and startrow parameters.

import xlsxwriter
import pandas as pd
import numpy as np

# Creating a dataframe 
df = pd.DataFrame(np.random.randn(100, 3), columns=list('ABC'))
column_list = df.columns
# Create a Pandas Excel writer using XlsxWriter engine.
writer = pd.ExcelWriter("test.xlsx", engine='xlsxwriter')

df.to_excel(writer, sheet_name='Sheet1', startrow=1, header=False, index=False)

# Get workbook and worksheet objects
workbook  = writer.book
worksheet = writer.sheets['Sheet1']


for idx, val in enumerate(column_list):
    worksheet.write(0, idx, val)

writer.save()

print(pd.__version__)

Expected Output:

0.24.2