Really great py module for reading .xls files. Instead of having to export excel to .csv and then parse, you can use this module to read/open/print info from whole excel files or from selected rows/cells. Research for this came about while trying to figure out at easier way to pull data from a particular portion of an excel sheet.
After you have installed xlrd the code is simple:
import xlrd
wb = xlrd.open_workbook('simple.xls')
wb.sheet_names()
sh = wb.sheet_by_index(0)
sh = wb.sheet_by_name(u'Sheet1')
for rownum in range(sh.nrows):
print sh.row_values(rownum)
Thanks to John Machin Author of:
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/xlrd/0.7.1