title: python : Get Active Sheet in xlrd? and help for reading and validating excel file in Python
body: <p>2 Questions to ask:</p>
  
  <p><b>Ques 1:</b>
  I just started studying about <a href="http://www.lexicon.net/sjmachin/xlrd.html" rel="nofollow">xlrd</a> for reading excel file in python.
  I was wondering if there is a method in xlsrd --> similar to <code>get_active_sheet()</code> in <a href="https://openpyxl.readthedocs.org/en/default/" rel="nofollow">openpyxl</a> or any other way to get the Active sheet ?</p>
  
  <p><code>get_active_sheet()</code> works this in <code>openpyxl</code></p>
  
  <pre>
  import openpyxl
  
  wb = openpyxl.load_workbook('example.xlsx')
  
  active_sheet = wb.get_active_sheet()
  
  
  </pre>
  
  <p>output : Worksheet "Sheet1"</p>
  
  <p>I had found methods in <code>xlrd</code> for retrieving the names of sheets, but none of them could tell me the active sheet.</p>
  
  <p><b>Ques 2: </b></p>
  
  <p>Is <code>xlrd</code> the best packaage in python for reading excel files? I also came across <a href="http://www.python-excel.org/" rel="nofollow">this</a> which had info about other python packages(<code>xlsxwriter</code><code>xlwt</code><code>xlutils</code>) for reading and writing excel files. </p>
  
  <p>Which of the above all will be best for making an App which reads an Excel File and applies different validations to to different columns</p>
  
  <p>For eg: Column with Header 'ID' should have unique values and A column with Header 'Country' should have valid Countries.</p>