reading excel to a python data frame starting from row 5 and including headers

The accepted answer is old (as discussed in comments of the accepted answer). Now the preferred option is using pd.read_excel(). For example:

df = pandas.read_excel('C:\Users\cb\Machine_Learning\cMap_Joins.xlsm'), skiprows=[0,1,2,3,4])

You can use pandas' ExcelFile parse method to read Excel sheets, see io docs:

xls = pd.ExcelFile('C:\Users\cb\Machine_Learning\cMap_Joins.xlsm')

df = xls.parse('Sheet1', skiprows=4, index_col=None, na_values=['NA'])

skiprows will ignore the first 4 rows (i.e. start at row index 4), and several other options.