title: How to read an excel column into a list?
body: <p>I'm reading a column from the Excel like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>import xlrd
  import openpyxl
  book = xlrd.open_workbook("English corpus.xlsx")
  sheet = book.sheet_by_index(0)
  
  data=[]
  for row_index in xrange(1, sheet.nrows): # skip heading row
      timestamp, text, header, transporter, device_type = sheet.row_values(row_index,
                                                                           end_colx=5)
      print (text)
      data.append(text)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>And then appending the cells from the <code>text</code> column (<code>text</code> column is a huge column having about 10000 entries) in the <code>data</code> list. But by doing this way, data is being appended in Unicode type format. And I'm unable to convert it to string (getting UnicodeEncode error - tried everything).</p>
  
  <p>Could anyone please tell me of any other way to read the cells from an Excel column into a python list such that the list element are of time string only and not Unicode?</p>