Compute Row‑Wise Minimums in Excel with Pandas: Simple Code Tricks

Introduction

In a recent Python community discussion, a user asked how to use pandas to process Excel data, specifically to compare multiple columns and obtain the minimum values.

Implementation

The original code already works, but a more concise approach is to assign each column to a variable. Below are two alternative solutions provided by contributors.

df['min'] = df[['标准数据', '测试1']].min(axis=1)
print(df['min'])

A second version uses a loop and f‑strings to handle several test columns:

import pandas as pd

df = pd.read_excel("cell_file.xlsx")
for i in range(1, 4):
    df[f'min{i}'] = df[['标准数据', f'测试{i}']].min(axis=1)

print(df)

The code demonstrates how to compute the row‑wise minimum across multiple columns using min(axis=1) and how string formatting can simplify handling many columns.

Conclusion

The article summarizes the pandas solution for the Excel problem, providing clear code examples that readers can apply to similar data‑processing tasks.