[python] Could pandas use column as index?

I have a spreadsheet like this:

Locality    2005    2006    2007    2008    2009

ABBOTSFORD  427000  448000  602500  600000  638500
ABERFELDIE  534000  600000  735000  710000  775000
AIREYS INLET459000  440000  430000  517500  512500

I don't want to manually swap the column with the row. Could it be possible to use pandas reading data to a list as this:

data['ABBOTSFORD']=[427000,448000,602500,600000,638500]
data['ABERFELDIE']=[534000,600000,735000,710000,775000]
data['AIREYS INLET']=[459000,440000,430000,517500,512500]

You can change the index as explained already using set_index. You don't need to manually swap rows with columns, there is a transpose (data.T) method in pandas that does it for you:

> df = pd.DataFrame([['ABBOTSFORD', 427000, 448000],
                    ['ABERFELDIE', 534000, 600000]],
                    columns=['Locality', 2005, 2006])

> newdf = df.set_index('Locality').T
> newdf

Locality    ABBOTSFORD  ABERFELDIE
2005        427000      534000
2006        448000      600000

then you can fetch the dataframe column values and transform them to a list:

> newdf['ABBOTSFORD'].values.tolist()

[427000, 448000]

You can set the column index using index_col parameter available while reading from spreadsheet in Pandas.

Here is my solution:

1. Firstly, import pandas as pd: import pandas as pd

2. Read in filename using pd.read_excel() (if you have your data in a spreadsheet) and set the index to 'Locality' by specifying the index_col parameter.

   df = pd.read_excel('testexcel.xlsx', index_col=0)

   At this stage if you get a 'no module named xlrd' error, install it using pip install xlrd.

3. For visual inspection, read the dataframe using df.head() which will print the following output

4. Now you can fetch the values of the desired columns of the dataframe and print it