Fastest Way to Read Excel in Python (via) Haki Benita produced a meticulously researched and written exploration of the options for reading a large Excel spreadsheet into Python. He explored Pandas, Tablib, Openpyxl, shelling out to LibreOffice, DuckDB and python-calamine (a Python wrapper of a Rust library). Calamine was the winner, taking 3.58s to read 500,00 rows—compared to Pandas in last place at 32.98s.
Recent articles
- My Lethal Trifecta talk at the Bay Area AI Security Meetup - 9th August 2025
- The surprise deprecation of GPT-4o for ChatGPT consumers - 8th August 2025
- GPT-5: Key characteristics, pricing and model card - 7th August 2025