A patch to the openpyxl to access Rich Text objects in loaded worksheets.

openpyxl_patch.py

from openpyxl.cell.text import Text
from openpyxl.reader import excel
from openpyxl.xml.constants import SHEET_MAIN_NS
from openpyxl.xml.functions import iterparse


def read_string_table(xml_source):
    """Read in all shared strings in the table.
    If a shared string has formatted snippets, the raw Text object is appended to the returned list.
    Otherwise, only the plain text content of the shared string is appended to the list.
    """
    strings = []
    STRING_TAG = '{%s}si' % SHEET_MAIN_NS
    for _, node in iterparse(xml_source):
        if node.tag == STRING_TAG:
            text_obj = Text.from_tree(node)
            if text_obj.formatted:
                text = text_obj  # return raw Text object
            else:  # original processing
                text = text_obj.content
                text = text.replace('x005F_', '')
            node.clear()
            strings.append(text)
    return strings


def patch_read_string_table():
    """call the method before importing any modules of openpyxl"""
    excel.read_string_table = read_string_table