read_excel error for header=None and index_col as list

[lcmcninch]

Code Sample

import pandas as pd
df = pd.read_excel('Book1.xlsx', header=None, index_col = [0, 1])

Problem description

Above leads to the following error. This seems to be related to the combination of header=None and index_col as a list. If I give an integer index_col, or leave out header=None (or specify a header) there is no error.

The only other reference to this issue I found was this stack overflow question.

I am seeing this in the latest release (1.0.1) as well as an older one (0.25.3). I haven't been able to install from master because I'm working on windows and don't have a compiler set up.

Example exel file (although the contents doesn't matter, it could be workbook with an empty sheet): Book1.xlsx

<redact>\lib\site-packages\pandas\io\excel\_base.py in read_excel(io, sheet_name, header, names, index_col, usecols, squeeze, dtype, engine, converters, true_values, false_values, skiprows, nrows, na_values, keep_default_na, verbose, parse_dates, date_parser, thousands, comment, skipfooter, convert_float, mangle_dupe_cols, **kwds)
    332         convert_float=convert_float,
    333         mangle_dupe_cols=mangle_dupe_cols,
--> 334         **kwds,
    335     )
    336

<redact>\lib\site-packages\pandas\io\excel\_base.py in parse(self, sheet_name, header, names, index_col, usecols, squeeze, converters, true_values, false_values, skiprows, nrows, na_values, parse_dates, date_parser, thousands, comment, skipfooter, convert_float, mangle_dupe_cols, **kwds)
    883             convert_float=convert_float,
    884             mangle_dupe_cols=mangle_dupe_cols,
--> 885             **kwds,
    886         )
    887

<redact>\lib\site-packages\pandas\io\excel\_base.py in parse(self, sheet_name, header, names, index_col, usecols, squeeze, dtype, true_values, false_values, skiprows, nrows, na_values, verbose, parse_dates, date_parser, thousands, comment, skipfooter, convert_float, mangle_dupe_cols, **kwds)
    467                 # Forward fill values for MultiIndex index.
    468                 if not is_list_like(header):
--> 469                     offset = 1 + header
    470                 else:
    471                     offset = 1 + max(header)

TypeError: unsupported operand type(s) for +: 'int' and 'NoneType'

Expected Output

A DataFrame with two column indexes.

Output of pd.show_versions()

INSTALLED VERSIONS

commit : None
python : 3.7.3.final.0
python-bits : 64
OS : Windows
OS-release : 10
machine : AMD64
processor : Intel64 Family 6 Model 158 Stepping 13, GenuineIntel
byteorder : little
LC_ALL : None
LANG : None
LOCALE : None.None

pandas : 1.0.1
numpy : 1.18.1
pytz : 2019.3
dateutil : 2.8.1
pip : 20.0.2
setuptools : 45.1.0
Cython : None
pytest : None
hypothesis : None
sphinx : None
blosc : None
feather : None
xlsxwriter : None
lxml.etree : None
html5lib : None
pymysql : None
psycopg2 : None
jinja2 : None
IPython : 7.12.0
pandas_datareader: None
bs4 : None
bottleneck : None
fastparquet : None
gcsfs : None
lxml.etree : None
matplotlib : None
numexpr : None
odfpy : None
openpyxl : 3.0.3
pandas_gbq : None
pyarrow : None
pytables : None
pytest : None
pyxlsb : None
s3fs : None
scipy : None
sqlalchemy : None
tables : None
tabulate : None
xarray : None
xlrd : 1.2.0
xlwt : None
xlsxwriter : None
numba : None