When it comes to working with data in a tabular form, most people reach for a spreadsheet. That's not a bad choice: Microsoft Excel and similar programs are familiar and loaded with functionality for massaging tables of data. But what if you want more control, precision, and power than Excel alone delivers?
In that case, the open source Pandas library for Python might be what you are looking for. It outfits Python with new data types for loading data fast from tabular sources, and for manipulating, aligning, merging, and doing other processing at scale.
Pandas is not part of the Python standard library. It's a third-party project, so you'll need to install it in your Python runtime with pip install pandas. Once installed, you can import it into Python with import pandas.
