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

I think Pandas is the best way to go. There is already one answer here with Pandas using ExcelFile function, but it did not work properly for me. From here I found the read_excel function which works just fine:

import pandas as pd
dfs = pd.read_excel("your_file_name.xlsx", sheet_name="your_sheet_name")
print(dfs.head(10))

P.S. You need to have the xlrd installed for read_excel function to work

Update 21-03-2020: As you may see here, there are issues with the xlrd engine and it is going to be deprecated. The openpyxl is the best replacement. So as described here, the canonical syntax should be:

dfs = pd.read_excel("your_file_name.xlsx", sheet_name="your_sheet_name", engine="openpyxl")