Using Excel files

While CSV files are common, it seems that the world is ruled by Excel. I've been surprised in my consulting work to see how many companies are using Excel as a critical if not the critical tool for making decisions.

In this recipe, we will show how to create and read Excel files. You may need to install xlwt or openpyxl to write XLS or XLSX files, respectively.

How to do it...

1. Create an Excel file using the .to_excel method. You can write either xls files or xlsx files:

   >>> beatles.to_excel("beat.xls")
   >>> beatles.to_excel("beat.xlsx")
   

   

   Excel file

2. Read the Excel file with the read_excel function:

   >>> beat2 = pd.read_excel("/tmp/beat.xls")
   >>> beat2
      Unnamed: 0    first       last  birth
   0           0     Paul  McCartney   1942
   1           1     John     Lennon   1940
   2           2  Richard    Starkey   1940
   3           3 ...