[Python] Leave dates as strings using read_excel function from pandas in python

Python 2.7.10
Tried pandas 0.17.1 -- function read_excel
Tried pyexcel 0.1.7 + pyexcel-xlsx 0.0.7 -- function get_records()

When using pandas in Python is it possible to read excel files (formats: xls, xlsx) and leave columns containing date or date + time values as strings rather than auto-converting to datetime.datetime or timestamp types?

If this is not possible using pandas can someone suggest an alternate method/library to read xls, xlsx files and leave date column values as strings?

For the pandas solution attempts the df.info() and resulting date column types are shown below:

>>> df.info()
<class 'pandas.core.frame.DataFrame'>
Int64Index: 117 entries, 0 to 116
Columns: 176 entries, Mine to Index
dtypes: datetime64[ns](2), float64(145), int64(26), object(3)
memory usage: 161.8+ KB
>>> type(df['Start Date'][0])
Out[6]: pandas.tslib.Timestamp
>>> type(df['End Date'][0])
Out[7]: pandas.tslib.Timestamp


Attempt/Approach 1:

def read_as_dataframe(filename, ext):
import pandas as pd
if ext in ('xls', 'xlsx'):
# problem: date columns auto converted to datetime.datetime or timestamp!
df = pd.read_excel(filename) # unwanted - date columns converted!

return df, name, ext


Attempt/Approach 2:

import pandas as pd
# import datetime as datetime
# parse_date = lambda x: datetime.strptime(x, '%Y%m%d %H')
parse_date = lambda x: x
elif ext in ('xls', 'xlsx', ):
df = pd.read_excel(filename, parse_dates=False)
date_cols = [df.columns.get_loc(c) for c in df.columns if c in ('Start Date', 'End Date')]
# problem: date columns auto converted to datetime.datetime or timestamp!
df = pd.read_excel(filename, parse_dates=date_cols, date_parser=parse_date)


And have also tried pyexcel library but it does the same auto-magic convert behavior:

Attempt/Approach 3:

import pyexcel as pe
import pyexcel.ext.xls
import pyexcel.ext.xlsx

t0 = time.time()
if ext == 'xlsx':
records = pe.get_records(file_name=filename)
for record in records:
print("start date = %s (type=%s), end date = %s (type=%s)" %
(record['Start Date'],
str(type(record['Start Date'])),
record['End Date'],
str(type(record['End Date'])))
)

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