The pandas library has a quick and easy way to read excel. If it's mostly just data and nothing too complicated it'll work:
import pandas as pd
ex_data = pd.read_excel('excel_file.xlsx')
It reads it into a pandas DataFrame, which is handy for data munging, etc.
To go to a list:
ex_data['column1_name'].values.tolist()
If you have multiple tables and things in each worksheet then you may want to use another library such as xlrd or openpyxl.
