Open protected excel file too slow

Question

I developed a script, that opens a huge load of protected (not password protected, just protected) excel files using xlwings, reads one column in each file and writes it to a dict, then closes. It works without producing any errors, but it's suuuper slow. Is there a faster way than my code below?

import xlwings as xw

def unprotect_xls(filename, date):

    workbook = xw.Book(filename)
    sheet = workbook.sheets['Table1']

    error_length[date] = dict(zip(range(1,21), sheet['BN7:BN26'].value))

    workbook.close()


#### not working example ####
file_names = ['file1', 'file2', ..., 'file999']
dates = ['date1', ...]

new_files = len(file_names) 

# make dict
error_length = {}

# open excel in background
app = xw.App(visible=False)

#fill dict
for i in range(new_files):
    unprotect_xls(file_names[i], dates[i])

app.quit()

Answer 1

Have you considered using openpyxl or xlrd for this task? You can also use pandas.read_excel function which uses one of these packages under the hood. xlwings is great if you need to interact with Excel but if you only need to batch read cell values, the reader libraries may be much better suited.