CLN: move odf import inline in excel benchmark
I know this is an optional dependency, but IMO it's still nice that running a different benchmark still works when you don't have odf installed (noticed this yesterday when running the isnull benchmarks). It's similar to pytest skipping if an optional dependency is not installed.
Does the asv.conf not account for this when building the environment? actually odpy is IN the asv.conf.json. Sorry for the slow reply: you are right the env creation handles this fine, but if you use `asv dev` or `asv run ` with some config, you can use your existing environment. So therefore I just ran into this (my dev environment was created before odpy was added as optional dependency). So no big deal, I just find it a bit friendlier to not directly error when you are trying to run other, unrelated benchmarks. we don’t do this for any other optional deps
this makes for a confusing style

i would say simply update the asv environment
 > i would say simply update the asv environment

It's *not* the asv environment

> we don’t do this for any other optional deps

We do this constantly in eg tests (you can run tests without having all optional dependencies installed) Yea I agree with Jeff - I think confusing to special case just this one library >  I think confusing to special case just this one library

I am happy to do it for *all* libraries, which are those odfpy imports and a single sqlalchemy import I still would rather not change this; we only document using `asv continuous` in the contributing guide as of now 1) Avoiding special casing is good (@jreback and @WillAyd's points)
2) The frictions in using asv in development are a PITA, things that mitigate that are good (@jorisvandenbossche's point)

I'm inclined to think the special casing here is pretty benign and 2 is more important. I would rather have asv hard fail than special case. special cases have a trend of making code harder to grok and splintering style. so closing this, but would take a PR to make *alls* optional deps not make it hard fail, or we do nothing.