How can I use python to read excel files from command line?

Since your question has a very broad spectrum and you have mentioned that you are a beginner, I will make a few assumptions here to make this easier.

Assumptions

• You have multiple excel files (file.xlsx) of the same format in the current folder.

• You want to type your filename or filenames in the terminal and get their corresponding plots.

Workflow

• Use python's built-in argparse module to collect the file names from the terminal

• Use pandas and xlrd module to load the excel files

• Use matplotlib to plot and show the plots.

Now let's say your current folder has the following xlsx files named tmp1.xlsx and tmp2.xlsx. The files have the same format and look like this:

Dependency Installation

Before diving into the code, make an environment and run the following commands to install the necessary dependencies:

pip install matplotlib pandas xlrd

sudo apt-get install python3-tk

Code

Now, make a python file named, excel_plot.py:

from argparse import ArgumentParser
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import pandas as pd


def get_filepaths():
    """Collect excel file paths from the terminal."""

    parser = ArgumentParser(description="Plot excel files")
    parser.add_argument(
        "filepath",
        type=str,
        nargs="+",
        help="provide the full path of your excel files",
    )
    filepaths = parser.parse_args()
    return filepaths


def plot_excels(filepaths):
    """Load and plot one aspect of the excel files."""

    # load the excel files that we got from the provided arguments
    for path in filepaths.filepath:
        df = pd.read_excel(path)
        df.plot(kind="line", title="Per unit price & number of units")
        plt.show()


if __name__ == "__main__":
    filepaths = get_filepaths()
    plot_excels(filepaths)

To check if the script works, run the following command on your terminal:

python excel_plot.py tmp1.xlsx 

This should return