title: Changing data type with pandas on read_excel
body: <p>I'm looking for some help as I'm actually quite new to pandas (and python).
  I'm facing a data type conversion problem with some datas.</p>
  
  <p>As you can see (and try), I'm trying to tell pandas that I want it to read the "DEP" data column as a string (because I want to keep the data unchanged)</p>
  
  <pre><code>&gt;&gt;&gt; df = pd.read_excel("http://www2.impots.gouv.fr/documentation/statistiques/ircom2003/dep/060.xls", 0, skiprows=23, na_values="n.d.")
  &gt;&gt;&gt; df.dtypes
  Unnamed: 0                                                  float64
  DEP                                                         float64
  Commune                                                     float64
  ...
  
  &gt;&gt;&gt; df["DEP"] = df["DEP"].astype(str)
  
  &gt;&gt;&gt; df.dtypes
  Unnamed: 0                                                  float64
  DEP                                                          object
  Commune                                                     float64
  .....
  
  &gt;&gt;&gt; df["DEP"][5]
  '60.0'
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>You can download the excel file if you want, but the input data look like this : (I've added the slash between column names)</p>
  
  <pre><code>DEP / Commune   / Libellé de la commune
  060 001 AIGLUN
  060 002 AMIRAT
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>In this case, I would like to simply keep the data "060" and "001" as strings.
  I'm using python 3.4 and pandas 0.16</p>
  
  <p>Thanks a lot for your help.</p>