xlrd

The library is OS independent and can be used from any system.

Features:

• Support for handling dates, and documentation of Excel date problems and how to avoid them.
• Unicode aware; correctly handles "compressed" Unicode in modern files; decodes legacy charsets in older files (if Python has the codec).
• Extracts all data (including Booleans and error-values)
• Extracts named references
• Extracts formatting information for cells (number format, font, alignment, borders, backgrounds, protection) and rows/columns (default height/width, etc).

Requirements:

• Python 2.1 or higher