[python] Reading/parsing Excel (xls) files with Python

For older .xls files, you can use xlrd

either you can use xlrd directly by importing it. Like below

import xlrd
wb = xlrd.open_workbook(file_name)

Or you can also use pandas pd.read_excel() method, but do not forget to specify the engine, though the default is xlrd, it has to be specified.

pd.read_excel(file_name, engine = xlrd)

Both of them work for older .xls file formats. Infact I came across this when I used OpenPyXL, i got the below error

InvalidFileException: openpyxl does not support the old .xls file format, please use xlrd to read this file, or convert it to the more recent .xlsx file format.