Load excel directly into psypark dataframe in a notebook

[viktor_vandenbu]

Currently, it's not possible to load an Excel file directly from the lakehouse into a PySpark DataFrame within a Fabric notebook. The existing solution requires first loading the file into a Pandas DataFrame and then converting it to a PySpark DataFrame, which negatively impacts performance with large files. It would be helpful if a Spark engine were available that allows Excel files to be loaded directly into a PySpark DataFrame, similar to how CSV files can be handled.