title: Reading a list of lists from an excel file column and storing it in a python list
body: <p>I know parts of this question might be simple, but I am a beginner in this and would really appreciate the simplest possible solution: I have an excel (.xlsx file) where one of its columns has its cells each have a list of lists of numbers (with the numbers space-separated and there is even a space at the end of each list). So, the column looks something like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>ColumnHeader  
  [[[9 9 9 9 9 13 ][11 11 11 11 11 11 ][11 11 11 11 11 11 ][9 9 9 9 9 9 ]  
  [[[9 9 9 9 9 9 ][9 9 9 9 9 9 ]]]  
  [[[9 9 9 9 ][14 14 14 14 ][13 13 13 13 ]]]  
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Note how each list has a different number of lists. Also, note that each list of lists has an extra [ and ] before and after it, respectively.</p>
  
  <p>What I would like to do is to ideally read the whole xlsx file in python (remember that there are other columns in the file that have just numbers), store it in a pandas dataframe, but have this column above be stored as a list of lists. So, if I later print this column, I would get something like the below (and that series if converted to a list would be a list of list of lists:</p>
  
  <pre><code>ColumnHeader  
  [[9,9,9,9,9,13],[11,11,11,11,11,11],[11,11,11,11,11,11],[9,9,9,9,9,9]]  
  [[9,9,9,9,9,9],[9,9,9,9,9,9]]  
  [[9,9,9,9],[14,14,14,14],[13,13,13,13]]  
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>If I just straight forwardly read the xlsx file into a pandas dataframe, it obviously reads this column as text, which is not what I desire.</p>
  
  <p>Any help on this would be highly appreciated.</p>
  
  <p>Aly</p>