Excel files are so common these days that often an analyst or developer receives an Excel file that needs to be mapped out. Sure, we could save these to a .csv
file and then use the great Python standard csv module but this involves an extra manual step. We will take a look at how to read a very simple Excel file that contains a list of Europe's highest mountains. This data set is derived from http://www.geonames.org.
We are going to need one new Python library to read a Microsoft Excel file and this library is xlrd (http://www.python-excel.org).
Note
This library can only READ an Excel file; if you are looking to write out to an Excel file, download and install xlwt.
First, fire up you virtual environment from your workon pygeoan_cb
Linux machine, run pip install xlrd
, and you are off to the races.
To write out to a new Shapefile, we will use the pyshp library we installed in Chapter 1, Setting Up Your Geospatial Python...