Reading an Excel file in python using pandas

Question

I am trying to read an excel file this way :

newFile = pd.ExcelFile(PATH\FileName.xlsx)
ParsedData = pd.io.parsers.ExcelFile.parse(newFile)

which throws an error that says two arguments expected, I don't know what the second argument is and also what I am trying to achieve here is to convert an Excel file to a DataFrame, Am I doing it the right way? or is there any other way to do this using pandas?

Answer 1

Close: first you call ExcelFile, but then you call the .parse method and pass it the sheet name.

>>> xl = pd.ExcelFile("dummydata.xlsx")
>>> xl.sheet_names
[u'Sheet1', u'Sheet2', u'Sheet3']
>>> df = xl.parse("Sheet1")
>>> df.head()
                  Tid  dummy1    dummy2    dummy3    dummy4    dummy5  \
0 2006-09-01 00:00:00       0  5.894611  0.605211  3.842871  8.265307   
1 2006-09-01 01:00:00       0  5.712107  0.605211  3.416617  8.301360   
2 2006-09-01 02:00:00       0  5.105300  0.605211  3.090865  8.335395   
3 2006-09-01 03:00:00       0  4.098209  0.605211  3.198452  8.170187   
4 2006-09-01 04:00:00       0  3.338196  0.605211  2.970015  7.765058   

     dummy6  dummy7    dummy8    dummy9  
0  0.623354       0  2.579108  2.681728  
1  0.554211       0  7.210000  3.028614  
2  0.567841       0  6.940000  3.644147  
3  0.581470       0  6.630000  4.016155  
4  0.595100       0  6.350000  3.974442  

What you're doing is calling the method which lives on the class itself, rather than the instance, which is okay (although not very idiomatic), but if you're doing that you would also need to pass the sheet name:

>>> parsed = pd.io.parsers.ExcelFile.parse(xl, "Sheet1")
>>> parsed.columns
Index([u'Tid', u'dummy1', u'dummy2', u'dummy3', u'dummy4', u'dummy5', u'dummy6', u'dummy7', u'dummy8', u'dummy9'], dtype=object)