We're using John Machin's xlrd 0.7.1 in about 20 projects to read Excel spreadsheets. Would updating to the latest version (0.9.2) work out of the box or are there known incompatibilities we should plan for?
According to Chris Withers, one of the maintainers of xlrd (in a message he sent today (2013-04-29) to the python-excel mailing list):
[The] only API change between 0.6 and 0.9 is the removal of the 'pickleable' parameter to open_workbook. However, this was removed because it hadn't worked in a long long time. ... Applications written for 0.6.x will still work without change when using 0.9.2.
I would expect whatever you have now to work as-is with the latest xlrd.