Getting your data into Python is likely one of your early steps in your project. That data could be in many different formats such as a text file, a spreadsheet file or a database.

Have a look at the post Read a CSV File into Python.

To learn more you can look at the online book by Wes McKinney Chapter 6 Data Loading, Storage and File Formats.

RAM

Are you running pandas on your laptop? How big is your data and how much RAM do you have? You should have 5 to 10 times as much RAM as the size of your dataset. So if you have a 5 GB dataset, you should really have about 32 GB of RAM, preferably 64 GB of RAM if you want to avoid memory management problems.

Learn with YouTube

Here is a video by Alex the Analyst called Reading in Files in Pandas | Python Pandas Tutorials. It’s part of a playlist.