Pandas read_excel: only read first few lines

Question

Using pandas read_excel on about 100 excel files - some are large - I want to read the first few lines of each (header and first few rows of data).

This doesn't work but illustrates the goal (example reading 10 data rows):

workbook_dataframe = pd.read_excel(workbook_filename, nrows = 10)

This is my current workaround:

workbook_dataframe = pd.read_excel(workbook_filename).head(10)

Problem with the workaround is it has to read the entire excel file before taking the head. I've also tried experimenting with skiprows and skip_footer, giving it negative numbers which just produces errors.

Answer 1

This isn't currently supported although looking at the code it doesn't look like it should be too hard. You can open an issue on the Github project page at https://github.com/pandas-dev/pandas/issues.