Importing Excel files

The read_excel method of the pandas library can be used to import data from an Excel file and load it into memory as a pandas data frame. In this recipe, we import an Excel file and handle some common issues when working with Excel files: extraneous header and footer information, selecting specific columns, removing rows with no data, and connecting to particular sheets.

Despite the tabular structure of Excel, which invites the organization of data into rows and columns, spreadsheets are not datasets and do not require people to store data in that way. Even when some data conforms to those expectations, there is often additional information in rows or columns before or after the data to be imported. Data types are not always as clear as they are to the person who created the spreadsheet. This will be all too familiar to anyone who has ever battled with importing leading zeros. Moreover, Excel does not insist that all data in a column be of the same type, or...