So my dataframe is made from lots of individual excel files, each with the the date as their file name and the prices of the fruits on that day in the spreadsheet, so the spread
You can try first set_index of all dataframes in comprehension
and then use concat with remove last level of multiindex
in columns:
print d
{'17012016': Fruit Price
0 Orange 7
1 Apple 8
2 Pear 9, '16012016': Fruit Price
0 Orange 4
1 Apple 5
2 Pear 6, '15012016': Fruit Price
0 Orange 1
1 Apple 2
2 Pear 3}
d = { k: v.set_index('Fruit') for k, v in d.items()}
df = pd.concat(d, axis=1)
df.columns = df.columns.droplevel(-1)
print df
15012016 16012016 17012016
Fruit
Orange 1 4 7
Apple 2 5 8
Pear 3 6 9