title: Using xlrd to read selected columns and all rows in python
body: <p>I would like to loop through an excel table and get the values for selected columns in each row in a set of lists or dictionary.  if in a dictionary, for each row, the value in the first selected column would be the key and the values in the other selected columns would be the values (array) for that key.  I cannot figure out how to tell python to read values from only selected columns...for the excel table may have 10 columns but I am only interest in three for example, and the three of interest are not contiguous.  Would appreciate your insights using XLRD.</p>
  
  <pre><code>    import xlrd
      from xlrd import open_workbook
      import arcpy
  
      wb = open_workbook ("c:\\Users\\Admin\\Documents\\Marion\\Courses\\GEOG485\\FinalProject\\Data\\ExcelFiles\\Belize_Culvert_Nov15_V4.0.xlsx")
  
      sheet = wb.sheet_by_index(1)
  
      keys = [sheet.cell(0, 5).value for col_index in xrange(sheet.ncols)]
  
      dict_list = []
      for rownum in range(sheet.nrows):
          d = {keys[col_index]: sheet.cell(0, 5).value 
          for col_index in xrange(sheet.ncols)}:
              dict_list.append(d)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The field that I want to use as key is column 5 and the values are columns #16 and #17 as an array value for each key...</p>