Fastest Way to Read Excel in Python (via) Haki Benita produced a meticulously researched and written exploration of the options for reading a large Excel spreadsheet into Python. He explored Pandas, Tablib, Openpyxl, shelling out to LibreOffice, DuckDB and python-calamine (a Python wrapper of a Rust library). Calamine was the winner, taking 3.58s to read 500,00 rows—compared to Pandas in last place at 32.98s.
Recent articles
- Distributing Go binaries like sqlite-scanner through PyPI using go-to-wheel - 4th February 2026
- Moltbook is the most interesting place on the internet right now - 30th January 2026
- Adding dynamic features to an aggressively cached website - 28th January 2026