How to convert Excel to CSV Python Pandas

In this article, you will learn how to convert Excel to CSV using Python Pandas.

Pandas is open source, fast, flexible, powerful, easy-to-use tools and are widely used for data manipulation and data analysis. It provides functionality to read data from various file formats, such as CSV, MS Excel, etc. As we know, Microsoft Excel has been used in many different applications and spreadsheet representations. We can easily organize a large amount of data by using this. It is also rich in features like calculation, graphing tools, pivot tables, producing graphs and charts, and much more. CSV is a widely used file format that stores data in a tabular format. Most popular programming languages have tools or applications to support the CSV file format.

CSV files have some advantages over Excel files. The CSV files are faster and consume less memory space, whereas Excel consumes more memory space while importing data. That's why it's important to convert excel to CSV.

Install Pandas in Python

Before starting work on Python Pandas, we need to install this module. So, open your command prompt, activate your virtual environment, and install it using the following command.

pip install pandas

On successful installation, it returns something like this-

Installing collected packages: pandas
Successfully installed pandas-1.0.1

Suppose we have the following excel file containing school program participant data.

Reading Excel file using Python Pandas

Here, we have first imported the Pandas module and passed the excel sheet file as a parameter in read_excel() method. This method reads the data into a Pandas DataFrame. It accepts filename in the first parameter and sheet name in the second parameter. DataFrame is the key data structure of Pandas.

import pandas as pd

df = pd.read_excel("school_event.xlsx") 

Convert Excel to CSV Python

Pandas DataFrame provides the to_csv() method to convert data from a dataframe to a CSV. If we provide the file location as an argument, then data is written to the file otherwise, CSV string is returned. This method provides many options, like we can provide a custom delimiter, specify the columns to be used, ignore the index column, and much more to the generated CSV file. Here is the complete code to convert Excel to CSV.

import pandas as pd

df = pd.read_excel("school_event.xlsx")

df.to_csv ("school.csv", index = None,  header=True) 

You can see how we can simply achieve more work from just 2-3 lines of code. This is one of the big advantages of Python Pandas.

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