How to Read a Row in Excel Using Python

Python is a powerful programming language with extensive libraries and modules that make it easy to perform various tasks. One such task is reading data from an Excel file. This tutorial will walk you through the steps required to read a row from an Excel spreadsheet using Python.

Step 1: Create a Sample File

Step 2: Reading the Excel File

After installing Pandas, you need to import it into your Python script, then use the read_excel() function to load your Excel file. To demonstrate this, we’re going to assume you have a simple Excel file called ‘test.xlsx’, with just a few rows and columns of data.

1
2
3
4
import pandas as pd
 
filename = 'test.xlsx'
df = pd.read_excel(filename)

Here, we are first importing the pandas library and giving it the alias ‘pd’. We then specify the name and location of our Excel file, and read the file using the function pd.read_excel().

Step 3: Accessing a Specific Row

Once the data from the Excel file has been read and stored in the dataframe ‘df’, you can now access a specific row using the iloc[] method.

1
row = df.iloc[1]

By passing the index of a row to the iloc[] method, you can select and access that row. Remember, Python uses 0-indexing, this means that the first row is at index 0.

The above command will store the second row from the Excel file in the variable ‘row’. To print this row, you can use a simple print statement.

1
print(row)

Complete Python Code

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
import pandas as pd
 
# Specify the filename
filename = 'test.xlsx'
 
# Read the data from the Excel file
df = pd.read_excel(filename)
 
# Access the second row of the data
row = df.iloc[1]
 
# print the row
print(row)

Output

Column 1    Value 13
Column 2    Value 14
Column 3    Value 15
Name: 1, dtype: object

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we showed you how you can use Python, and specifically the pandas library, to read data from an Excel file and access specific rows of that data. This can be incredibly useful when dealing with large datasets stored in Excel format.

Remember to install necessary dependencies like pandas, and keep in mind that Python uses 0-indexing while working with row and column indices.