[python] How can I open an Excel file in Python?

This isn't as straightforward as opening a plain text file and will require some sort of external module since nothing is built-in to do this. Here are some options:

http://www.python-excel.org/

If possible, you may want to consider exporting the excel spreadsheet as a CSV file and then using the built-in python csv module to read it:

http://docs.python.org/library/csv.html