title: python pandas read_excel returns UnicodeDecodeError on describe()
body: <p>I love pandas, but I am having real problems with Unicode errors. read_excel() returns the dreaded Unicode error:</p>
  
  <pre><code>import pandas as pd
  df=pd.read_excel('tmp.xlsx',encoding='utf-8')
  df.describe()
  
  ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
  UnicodeDecodeError                        Traceback (most recent call last)
  ...
  UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc2 in position 259: ordinal not in range(128)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I figured out that the original Excel had  &nbsp;  (non-breaking space) at the end of many cells, probably to avoid conversion of long digit strings to float.</p>
  
  <p>One way around this is to strip the cells, but there must be something better.</p>
  
  <pre><code>for col in df.columns:
      df[col]=df[col].str.strip()
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I am using anaconda2.2.0 win64, with pandas 0.16</p>