How to open excel file fast in Python?

Question

I am now using PyExcelerator for reading excel files, but it is extremely slow. As I always need to open excel files more than 100MB, it takes me more than twenty minutes to only load one file.

The functionality I need are:

• Open Excel Files, Select Specific Tables, And Load Them Into a Dict or List object.
• Sometimes: Select Specific Columns And Only Load Whole Lines Which Have the Specific Columns in Specific Values.
• Read Excel Files With Password Protected.

And the code I am using now is:

book = pyExcelerator.parse_xls(filepath)
parsed_dictionary = defaultdict(lambda: '', book[0][1])
number_of_columns = 44
result_list = []
number_of_rows = 500000
for i in range(0, number_of_rows):
    ok = False
    result_list.append([])
    for h in range(0, number_of_columns):
        item = parsed_dictionary[i,h]
        if type(item) is StringType or type(item) is UnicodeType:
            item = item.replace("\t","").strip()
        result_list[i].append(item)
        if item != '':
            ok = True
    if not ok:
        break

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

pyExcelerator appears not to be maintained. To write xls files, use xlwt, which is a fork of pyExcelerator with bug fixes and many enhancements. The (very basic) xls reading capability of pyExcelerator was eradicated from xlwt. To read xls files, use xlrd.

If it's taking 20 minutes to load a 100MB xls file, you must be using one or more of: a slow computer, a computer with very little available memory, or an older version of Python.

Neither pyExcelerator nor xlrd read password-protected files.

Here's a link that covers xlrd and xlwt.

Disclaimer: I'm the author of xlrd and maintainer of xlwt.

Answer 2

xlrd is pretty good for reading files and xlwt is pretty good for writing. Both superior to pyExcelerator in my experience.