title: Get the maximum value from an excel column using XLRD
body: <p>I would like to get the maximum value from 25th column of an excel spreadsheet using xlrd. Here's what I did.</p>
  
  <pre><code>import xlrd
  book = xlrd.open_workbook("File Location\Filename.xlsx")
  sheet = book.sheet_by_index(0)
  
  def follow_up():
      col = 24
      row = 1
      max = 1
      while row &lt; 100:
          a = sheet.cell(row, col).value
          if a&gt;max:
              return a
          else:
              return max
          row+=1
  
  print(follow_up())
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I run into an issue for cells with less than 100 values in a column (gives me IndexError) and the code won't work for cells with more than 100 values in a column. This can be fixed if I know how to get the number of values in a column. But I was wondering if anyone knows a "cleaner" way to do this.</p>