I am an absolute beginner in Python programming. I have a bunch of excel files (with extension .xls) which I would like to be able to read in python. I have to extract 2 columns from a given sheet from each file and write them into a CSV file. This is data coming from some measurement results so the format of each excel file is the same. I have to create n CSV files from a given number of n excel files.
From my general search I figured I could use module xlrd. I tried downloading the module as described here. I am working on windows with python 2 and using Python GUI IDLE. When I go to the command line in windows, browse to the folder where I saved the module files and type
python setup.py build
I get an error message saying "python is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file."
I also setup the system variable as described here but that does not help. As I read somewhere else, I use
import sys
print sys.path
which displays
['', 'C:\\Python27\\Lib\\idlelib', 'C:\\Windows\\system32\\python27.zip', 'C:\\Python27\\DLLs', 'C:\\Python27\\lib', 'C:\\Python27\\lib\\plat-win', 'C:\\Python27\\lib\\lib-tk', 'C:\\Python27', 'C:\\Python27\\lib\\site-packages']
Does that mean my environment variable is correctly set up? Please help me getting started with using .xls files in Python.
Thanks.
