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
- Highlights from my appearance on the Data Renegades podcast with CL Kao and Dori Wilson - 26th November 2025
- Claude Opus 4.5, and why evaluating new LLMs is increasingly difficult - 24th November 2025
- sqlite-utils 4.0a1 has several (minor) backwards incompatible changes - 24th November 2025