Issue with xlsxwriter and ignoring "="

I'm using Python's xlsxwriter to write records from a sql database into an excel file. One particular column has certain cells that begin with the "=" sign, which obviously poses a problem when excel then tries to interpret these cells. I found that I can escape this with a ' (single quote). After trying it manually in Excel, I went ahead and tried it in my code. It worked as I no longer was getting the Excel formula error, but unlike when I tried it manually the single quote is still visible when I open the workbook in Excel. How can I bypass this Excel error without also affecting the final Excel output?

with pandas.ExcelWriter(
    "file.xlsx", engine="xlsxwriter", mode="w"
    ) as writer:
    workbook = writer.book
    sheet_name = 'Sheet1'
    sheet_data = spark.read.csv(
        "path_to_file", header=True, multiLine=True
    )
    current_sheet = workbook.get_worksheet_by_name(sheet_name)
    spam_catch = current_sheet.write(
                            f"{setting['column']}{row_number}",
                            cell_output
                      )

You can pass a XlsxWriter constructor option to prevent it from converting strings that start with "=" into formulas.

Something like this should work:

with pandas.ExcelWriter(
        "file.xlsx", 
        engine="xlsxwriter", 
        engine_kwargs={'options': {'strings_to_formulas': False}})
    ) as writer:

See also Passing XlsxWriter constructor options to Pandas.