HACKER Q&A
📣 etothepii

What should go in an Excel-to-Python equivalent of a couch-to-5k?


Yesterday, my co-founder published a blog about her experiences Ditching Excel for Python in her job as a Reinsurance Analyst [0].

One of the responses on reddit [1] asked what they should do, "Step 1 day 1," if having read Amy's post they were convinced to try and begin the long journey from tangled Excel/Access spaghetti.

My (flippant) reaction to a friend that brought the comment to my attention was unhelpful; "Step 1 day 1, quit." So he has challenged me to write eight helpful blog posts during the remainder of my Garden Leave.

What should go in them?

[0] https://amypeniston.com/ditching-excel-for-python/

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/knbv5t/ditching_excel_for_python_lessons_learned_from_a/ghm559c/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=web2x&context=3

  👤 westurner Accepted Answer ✓
How to write functions in JS / VB script and call them from a cell expression.

How to name variables something other than AB3.

How to use physical units and datatypes. (How to specify XSD datatype URIs that map to native primitives in an additional frozen header row. e.g. py-moneyed and Pint & NumPy ufuncs)

How transitive sort works (is there a tsort to determine what to calculate first (and whether there are cycles) on every modification event?)

Which Jupyter platforms do and don't support interactive charts with e.g. ipywidgets?

pandas.df.plot(kind=) (matplotlib), seaborne (what are the calculated parameters of this chart?), holoviews, plotly, altair

Reproducibility w/ repo2docker / BinderHub:

   pip freeze > constraints.txt
   cp constraints.txt requirements.txt
   conda env export --from-history
👤 Jugurtha
>My (flippant) reaction to a friend that brought the comment to my attention was unhelpful; "Step 1 day 1, quit." So he has challenged me to write eight helpful blog posts during the remainder of my Garden Leave.

One way to do it would be to do impedance matching: maximizing usefulness by bringing Python to the universe the person who asked the question lives in: Excel, Word, PDF, email.

This means "Automate the Boring Stuff"[0] to ease into programming with something specific to do that is relevant and useful right off the bat for manipulating files, spreadsheets, PDF documents, etc.

Openpyxl[1] for playing more with Excel files, and basically searching "Excel Python" on the internet for more use cases.

Python-docx[2] for playing with Word documents, extracting content from tables, etc.

PdfPlumber[3] for playing with PDFs. Sometimes you have data in .pptx files, and you can use LibreOffice to convert all of them to PDFs because you hate the pptx format:

  libreoffice --headless --invisible --convert-to pdf *.pptx
Also, if you both are using notebooks, take a look at what we're building at https://iko.ai. I posted about it a bit earlier[4]. It has no-setup real-time Jupyter notebooks, and all the jazz. Focuses on solving machine learning problems since we built it for ourselves to slash projects' time.

- [0]: https://nostarch.com/automatestuff2

- [1]: https://openpyxl.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

- [2]: https://python-docx.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

- [3]: https://github.com/jsvine/pdfplumber

- [4]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25608098