I wrote a handy wrapper for xlrd in 2014 while making my project Ninhursag. I just checked and it still works with Python 2 – here is an example usage:

  pip2 install excelsior
  curl -O https://prd-wret.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets/palladium/production/atoms/files/ds140-2017-bauxi.xlsx
  excelsior -f tsv ds140-2017-bauxi.xlsx

Source code: https://github.com/peterhil/excelsior

The Ninhursag project is visualisation and modeling of USGS data series 140, which include world production of almost all minerals starting from the year 1900:

https://ninhursag.herokuapp.com/mineral/statistics (Heroku free tier – might take a few seconds to load)