 <p><a href="https://pypi.python.org/pypi/xlrd" rel="nofollow">xlrd</a> has support for .xlsx files, and this <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/a/9897909/1452002">answer</a> suggests that at least the beta version of xlrd with .xlsx support was quicker than openpyxl. </p> <p>The current stable version of Pandas (11.0) uses openpyxl for .xlsx files, but this has been changed for the next release. If you want to give it a go, you can download the dev version from <a href="https://github.com/pydata/pandas" rel="nofollow">GitHub</a></p>