Monthly Archives: October 2008

Comma Separated Values, CSV, is the most basic way to export data out of just about any program that handles data in table format, from databases to spread sheets. The problem is that CSV isn’t standardized, so different programs can … Continue reading →

Excel’s data format is everywhere in the business world, and more often than not, you’ll wind up getting chunks of data from people dumped into an Excel file. Sure, CSV tends to be the “lowest common denominator” exchange format for … Continue reading →

One of the things that can confuse a lot of people who are new to data analysis is the concept of “data is data.”  That is to say, so long as I have the data, the topic that I am … Continue reading →

Working with Excel is all about manipulating the data and relationships between cells, and there are lots of ways to do such a thing. Here’s a tour of a few of those variations. Subscribe to the comments on this post

One of the problems we frequently encounter in business is that our data is not as clean as we might want it to be.  We are plagued by duplicates, fields that are formatted incorrectly or in the wrong place, needed … Continue reading →

Manipulating Excel with Python feels very much like manipulating Excel from within the VBA language. In fact, it uses the same objects, and the only major differences are that you don’t have access to autocompletion, and the syntax for function … Continue reading →

Automating and extending the various features of Microsoft Office is often done with the Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), and in the (relatively near) future, the .NET frameworks. But thing about VBA that’s annoying is that it’s usually bound within … Continue reading →