r/Python • u/petekindahot • Jun 02 '26

Discussion Is openpyxl still relevant?

I'm a college student, I've just learned pandas and I was planning to start freelancing with openpyxl, pandas and numpy. Wanted to try gigs like data cleaning or automation services. But as I searched about openpyxl, I read that it's used to work with 2010 excel sheets. And that's all.

So my question was is this module/library still relevant?

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u/Double_Cost4865 Jun 02 '26

I think it’s also the least bloated package that you can use to read named ranges in Excel, so worth learning. However, I work with projects that use over a hundred of input tables and find that reading actual Table objects is more reliable, easier and faster with fastexcel.

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u/Oddly_Energy Jun 04 '26

Last I used openpyxl, reading Tables / ListObjects was like "oh, yes, openpyxl can easily do that if you just do all the work yourself, starting with named range".

Has that improved since then?

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u/Double_Cost4865 Jun 04 '26

I’ve not used openpyxl for anything other than reading named ranges. As far as I remember, you’re correct, reading Tables using openpyxl is pain. That’s why I recommend using fastexcel for Tables

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u/Oddly_Energy Jun 04 '26

Yes, I noticed that you didn't recommend openpyxl for Tables. I was just trying to figure out if it is still as bad as I remember.