A small footprint xslx reader that understands shared strings and can process excel dates.
book = Workbook('filename or filedescriptor') #Open xlsx file
for sheet in book:
print sheet.name
for row, cells in sheet.rows().iteritems(): # or sheet.cols()
print row # prints row number
for cell in cells:
print cell.id, cell.value, cell.formula
# or you can access the sheets by their name:
some_sheet = book['some sheet name']
...
To my knowledge there are other python alternatives: