title: Error when reading excel (xls) files into dataframe
body: <p>I am trying to read several excel files using pd.read_excel. However, there is error:
  <code>UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-16-le' codec can't decode bytes in position 114-115: unexpected end of data</code>.</p>
  <p>So I tried to add <code>encoding = &quot;latin1&quot;</code> and here is the error: <code>TypeError: read_excel() got an unexpected keyword argument 'encoding'</code>.</p>
  <p>When I saved xls as csv using Excel and then read csv with <code>encoding=&quot;latin1&quot;</code> it works. However, I want to read xls directly without converting to csv. Is it possible to fix this issue? Thank you.</p>
  <p>Edited: the importing works if using xlsx rather than xls.</p>