Faster way to read Excel files to pandas dataframe

As others have suggested, csv reading is faster. So if you are on windows and have Excel, you could call a vbscript to convert the Excel to csv and then read the csv. I tried the script below and it took about 30 seconds.

# create a list with sheet numbers you want to process
sheets = map(str,range(1,6))

# convert each sheet to csv and then read it using read_csv
df={}
from subprocess import call
excel="C:\\Users\\rsignell\\OTT_Data_All_stations.xlsx"
for sheet in sheets:
    csv = 'C:\\Users\\rsignell\\test' + sheet + '.csv' 
    call(['cscript.exe', 'C:\\Users\\rsignell\\ExcelToCsv.vbs', excel, csv, sheet])
    df[sheet]=pd.read_csv(csv)

Here’s a little snippet of python to create the ExcelToCsv.vbs script:

#write vbscript to file
vbscript="""if WScript.Arguments.Count < 3 Then
    WScript.Echo "Please specify the source and the destination files. Usage: ExcelToCsv <xls/xlsx source file> <csv destination file> <worksheet number (starts at 1)>"
    Wscript.Quit
End If

csv_format = 6

Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")

src_file = objFSO.GetAbsolutePathName(Wscript.Arguments.Item(0))
dest_file = objFSO.GetAbsolutePathName(WScript.Arguments.Item(1))
worksheet_number = CInt(WScript.Arguments.Item(2))

Dim oExcel
Set oExcel = CreateObject("Excel.Application")

Dim oBook
Set oBook = oExcel.Workbooks.Open(src_file)
oBook.Worksheets(worksheet_number).Activate

oBook.SaveAs dest_file, csv_format

oBook.Close False
oExcel.Quit
""";

f = open('ExcelToCsv.vbs','w')
f.write(vbscript.encode('utf-8'))
f.close()

This answer benefited from Convert XLS to CSV on command line and csv & xlsx files import to pandas data frame: speed issue