How would I take an excel file and convert its columns into lists in Python?
Question: I had the following question. Namely, suppose I have an excel file with some
names in the first row. Then the next however many rows are single letter
entries (so "A", "B", "C" and so on).

My goal is to extract the column and make it into a list, so that, say, for
column 1 the list would start in row 2, the next entry would be from row 3,
and so on, until the end is reached.

How would I do that in Python?


Answer: I used a module called **xlrd**.

Some information on that
<http://www.blog.pythonlibrary.org/2014/04/30/reading-excel-spreadsheets-with-
python-and-xlrd/>

And here is the package: <https://pypi.python.org/pypi/xlrd>

To exclude the first row, and make different lists for different columns you
could do something like...

    
    
    from xlrd import open_workbook
    
    book = open_workbook("mydata.xlsx")
    sheet = book.sheet_by_index(0) #If your data is on sheet 1
    
    column1 = []
    column2 = []
    #...
    
    for row in range(1, yourlastrow): #start from 1, to leave out row 0
        column1.append(sheet.cell(row, 0)) #extract from first col
        column2.append(sheet.cell(row, 1))
        #...
    

Put the index-1 of the last row that contains data in the 'yourlastrow'
placeholder.

