Well, the detour via pandas may work but seems less than perfect. I would use PyWin32 and COM wrapping. Then you can use the normal EXCEL interface directly.
To support such tasks I wrote an EXCEL wrapper that allows to use the EXCLE API even in a pythonic way i. e. you may call the saveas method of a workbook as SaveAs as defined, as saveas or as save_as. All done automatically. Same should work for the parameters. If you consequently use this, one may even won't notice you are using pure EXCEL API in your Python code. With that you only have the overhead of COM interfacing but not all internal file formattingt logic in openPyXL in Python. I think this has a substantial impact on runtime. However, you need to have an EXCEL installation for this to work.