title: Speed up importing a big excel file to a pandas data frame
body: <p>I have a relatively large excel file (.xlsx) with one sheet that contains over 100k+ rows spanning over 350+ columns, totaling 83 MB in file size.</p>
  
  <p>I use <code>pandas</code> method <code>read_excel()</code> to load the file up, but it takes on average almost 5 minutes to get this all done and eats up over 800 MB in memory.</p>
  
  <pre><code>excel_file = '/path/to/an_excel_file'
  try:
      data = pd.read_excel(excel_path, engine='xlrd')
      process_data_further(data)
  except FileNotFoundError:
      sys.exit(1)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>As said above, this works, but I find it relatively slow and inefficient.</p>
  
  <p>Any idea how to optimize the import of the file?</p>