Do Excel things, get notebook Python code with Mito

|

#343: Do Excel things, get notebook Python code with Mito

11/30/21 by Michael Kennedy (@mkennedy)

Web player: https://podcastaddict.com/episode/132012853
Episode: https://talkpython.fm/episodes/download/343/do-excel-things-get-notebook-python-code-with-mito.mp3

Here’s a question: What’s the most common way to explore data? Would you say pandas and matplotlib? Maybe you went more general and said Jupyter notebooks. How about Excel, or Google Sheets, or Numbers, or some other spreadsheet app? Yeah, my bet is on Excel. And while it has many drawbacks, it makes exploring tabular data very accessible to many people, most of whom aren’t even developers or data scientists.

On this episode, we’re talking about a tool called Mito. This is an add-in for Jupyter notebooks that injects an Excel-like interface into the notebook. You pass it data via a pandas dataframe (or some other source) and then you can explore it as if you’re using Excel. The cool thing is though, just below that, it’s writing the pandas code you’d need to do to actually accomplish that outcome in code.

I think this will make pandas and Python data exploration way more accessible to many more people. So if you’ve been intimidated by pandas, or know someone who has, this could be what you’ve been looking for.

Sit Here

|

These chairs at the overlook are truly wonderful. A bit hard if you sit in them for a number of hours, but with that warm sun and great veiws, a must visit.

Taken on Monday May 25, 2009 at Palenville Overlook.

xlsxwriter python API

|

I’ve lately been doing a real deep dive into the xlsxwriter python API.

It’s great – you can take any PANDAS data frame and convert it into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet with formulas and full formatting, including merged cells, number formats, page layout, headers and footers – it looks like one had created the final output in Excel – but done programmatically so the computer does all the work and you could potentially crank out hundreds of nicely formatted, customized Excel files in a few seconds.

Purple Tree

|

There is a tree at Point Au Rouche that stands out at the end of Long Point. This time of year it has no leaves and against a bright blue sky really stands out and grabs you in the most interesting way. It makes you want to follow it's lines and try to find the root of all truths.

Taken on Tuesday December 12, 2006 at Point Au Roche State Park.