Although I almost always just use pandas for this, my current little tool is being packaged into an executable and including pandas is overkill. So I created a version of poida's solution that resulted in a list of named tuples. His code with this change would look like this:
from xlrd import open_workbook
from collections import namedtuple
from pprint import pprint
wb = open_workbook('sample.xls')
FORMAT = ['Arm_id', 'DSPName', 'PinCode']
OneRow = namedtuple('OneRow', ' '.join(FORMAT))
all_rows = []
for s in wb.sheets():
headerRow = s.row(0)
columnIndex = [x for y in FORMAT for x in range(len(headerRow)) if y == headerRow[x].value]
for row in range(1,s.nrows):
currentRow = s.row(row)
currentRowValues = [currentRow[x].value for x in columnIndex]
all_rows.append(OneRow(*currentRowValues))
pprint(all_rows)