How to import date from excel and use it?

I have a input file which contain three columns: "start date", "end date" and "interval". Input file:

start date  end date    interval
01/01/2020  10/01/2020     15

i want to use these values in pandas date_range function. my

import pandas as pd

timeDF = pd.read_excel('inputFile.xlsx')

startDate = timeDF['start date']
endDate = timeDF['end date']
interval = timeDF['interval']

timeStamp = pd.date_range(start = startDate, end = endDate, freq = str(interval) + 'min')

print(timeStamp)

error that I am getting:

Name: Interval, dtype: int64min

Solution

You're running into this problem because you're concatenating the string "min" onto interval, which is a pandas.core.series.Series object.

When you call pd.read_excel('inputFile.xlsx'), you get a dictionary of Series objects, so startDate, endDate, and interval are all Series objects you should extract data from instead of using directly.

In order to get around this error, you can use timeDF['name'].values.item() to get your values for all three variables like so:

import pandas as pd

timeDF = pd.read_excel('inputFile.xlsx')

startDate = timeDF['start date'].values.item()
endDate = timeDF['end date'].values.item()
interval = timeDF['interval'].values.item()

timeStamp = pd.date_range(start = startDate, end = endDate, freq = str(interval) + 'min')

print(timeStamp)

Output:

DatetimeIndex(['2020-01-01 00:00:00', '2020-01-01 00:15:00',
               '2020-01-01 00:30:00', '2020-01-01 00:45:00',
               '2020-01-01 01:00:00', '2020-01-01 01:15:00',
               '2020-01-01 01:30:00', '2020-01-01 01:45:00',
               '2020-01-01 02:00:00', '2020-01-01 02:15:00',
               ...
               '2020-09-30 21:45:00', '2020-09-30 22:00:00',
               '2020-09-30 22:15:00', '2020-09-30 22:30:00',
               '2020-09-30 22:45:00', '2020-09-30 23:00:00',
               '2020-09-30 23:15:00', '2020-09-30 23:30:00',
               '2020-09-30 23:45:00', '2020-10-01 00:00:00'],
              dtype='datetime64[ns]', length=26305, freq='15T')