Microsoft Excel – basic reading/writing

Microsoft Excel is an extremely popular tool for data analysis, given its ease of use and ubiquity. Microsoft Excel provides a rather powerful toolkit that can help to cleanse, transform, store, and visualize data, all without requiring any knowledge of programming languages. Many successful analysts may consider it to be the only tool they will ever need. Despite this, Microsoft Excel really struggles with performance and scalability and, when used as a storage medium, may even materially change your data in unexpected ways.

If you have used Microsoft Excel before and are now picking up pandas, you will find that pandas works as a complementary tool. With pandas, you will give up the point-and-click usability of Microsoft Excel, but you will easily unlock performance that takes you far beyond the limits of Microsoft Excel.

Before we jump into this recipe, it’s worth noting that Microsoft Excel support is not shipped as...