Pandas is an open-source Python package that is most widely used for data science/data analysis and machine learning tasks. It provides support for multi-dimensional arrays and data manipulation. Pandas strengthens Python by giving the popular programming language the capability to work with spreadsheet-like data enabling fast loading, aligning, manipulating, and merging, in addition to other key functions. It is prized for providing highly optimized performance when backend source code is written in C or Python. Pandas has become popular because it provides a powerful set of commands and features that are used to easily analyze data. It can be used to perform various tasks like filtering data according to certain conditions, or segmenting and segregating data according to preference. It can efficiently handle large datasets and provides spreadsheet functionality.