I have some data in an excel file and I read it using pandas read_excel method. However I want to read the entire data in all columns as strings including the date column. The problem is that I want to leave the date column in its original format as string. For example, I have '31.01.2017' in the excel and it is formatted as date and I want to have '31.01.2017' in my data frame. I thought using dytpes parameter of read_excel with dtype=str was the correct approach. But pandas then reads the date column as datetime and then converts it to string. So at the end I always have '2017-01-31 00:00:00' in my data frame. Is there any way to do this? Continue reading...
