excel - Load only a single sheet from a large workbook with Python

Question

Using Python 3.7. I have several .xlsx workbooks with 34 sheets each, most of which have conditional formatting and charts, but all I'm actually after is a cell with specified text that's somewhere on the first sheet of each book. The workbook is not protected but the sheet is, and I don't know the password, so I can't use pandas.read_excel; using openpyxl/load_workbook, it takes ages to load and I get lots of errors about it not being able to handle conditional formatting etc. I then have to search the sheet for the text. Is there an easy, quick way of loading just the first sheet (or a named sheet)? The pandas code is very quick and easy, but I can't use it :(

Answer 1

Not completely sure about that but I can recommend trying "read-only" mode from openpyxl https://openpyxl.readthedocs.io/en/stable/optimized.html

It does not fetch the full file but read it in so-called "lazy" mode. Thus you can jump to the cell you need.

It also allows to start reading from the specific sheet

Note that closing file is mandatory