Python – Reading an Excel file using xlrd

Hello Friends,

Let’s continue exploring Python

Today in this article we are going to discuss about how to install xlrd in Python using – pip and reading excel file using xlrd

What is xlrd?

xlrd is a module that allows Python to read data from Excel files.

Install XLRD using pip in Python

If we want to use python to read the data from the Excel table, we need to install xlrd package in Python

To Install xlrd package follow the steps given-

1. Open command prompt
2. If we want to use pip to install the xlrd package then we can do as follows:

pip install xlrd

We can also install xlrd package using easy install follows:

easy_install xlrd

We could uninstall xlrd using “uninstall” attribute of pip

pip uninstall xlrd

How to read Excel file in the Python program –

• Import the module – xlrd

import xlrd

• We have to give the location of the file where our file is stored

location = "D:\Python programs\Excelfiletest.xls"

• xlrd has the function – open_workbook() which takes the parameter – path of excel file and opens the workbook, returns the workbook object as

workbook = xlrd.open_workbook(location)

• Once we have the workbook object we can read the any sheet using workbook.sheet _by_index()
• workbook.sheet _by_index() – takes the parameter sheet index, here we are reading first sheet from the workbook

sheet = workbook.sheet_by_index(0)

• Now we can read the cell value using sheet.cell_value()

Complete program :

import xlrd
 
location = "D:\Python programs\Excelfiletest.xls"
 
workbook = xlrd.open_workbook(location)
sheet = workbook.sheet_by_index(0)
 
print(sheet.cell_value(0, 0))

xlsx file is not supported in xlrd module

1. xlsx file is not supported in xlrd module
2. For example, if we try to read xlsx file it will show the error – xlrd.biffh.XLRDError: Excel xlsx file; not supported

Thank you for reading this article