Read tabular data from Excel spreadsheets the fast and easy way (Python)

Python recipe 440661 by Nicolas Lehuen (database). Revision 3.

Sometimes you get an Excel spreadsheet (say, from the marketing departement) and you want to read tabular data from it (i.e. a line with column headers and lines of data). There are many ways to do this (including ODBC + mxODBC), but the easiest way I've found is this one : provide a file name and a sheet name, and read the data !