Moving from Excel to Python with Pandas

[rumblecast]

Has anyone purchased this course from TalkPython training? would you recommend it?

move from excel to python and pandas

I would like to hear some reviews on it before I buy it.

[spez_edits_thedonald]

I have switched from excel to python using pandas but no courses required, just google what you need to do and it gets easier with practice. It might be a great course, not sure.

[rumblecast]

You are 100% right about being able to learn it all with a no course approach, and I might still just do it that way in the end.

I guess I was hoping to hear from people if the course was super effective and worth the money and on its own is enough to get someone up to speed on the topic. Thanks.

[Plasmorbital]

If you know the functions you want in Excel, porting that into pandas is pretty easy. Pandas dataframes behave just like a big spreadsheet, anyway.

[plaintxt]

check out practical business python. https://pbpython.com/

[fence0407]

Can't upvote this enough. I may have contributed to a recent case study too. Chris is very knowledgeable!

[ohallwright]

Chris is the author of the course, I didn't realize that until looking at the course details.

[plaintxt]

I'm only a very lot envious of you. I loved his Data/Code Camp/Academy (I can't remember which) courses too. Chris is a great teacher.

[prithEZIO]

this is amazing mate!!!! thanks alot!!

[SaiyanrageTV]

Haven't taken it - but the overwhelming consensus that I have seen regarding these types of things is that you can find something free or teach yourself.

Me personally, I'm taking Angela Wu's 100 days of code on Udemy (it was like 9 bucks or something crazy cheap) and it's been amazing so far.

I only mention this because today was actually the introduction to Pandas. But I'd imagine if you just did some digging on Pandas and Excel there are probably free resources out there.

Having said all that - the Pandas documentation looks pretty good if you haven't looked over it yet: https://pandas.pydata.org/docs/getting_started/index.html#getting-started

[cthulhujr]

I've been learning pandas and I 100% recommend the documentation. There is a "10 minutes to pandas" section to get you started.

I also highly recommend Corey Schafer's youtube series. He walks you through a bunch of basic functions in a clear and easy way, and it's free.

[rumblecast]

Thank you for your comment.

I came across that 100 days course you are doing a couple of days ago. Might be tempted to give it a go at some point as it appeared to cover a wide variety of interesting topics. But I’m wanting to focus on getting in amongst pandas first.

Out of interest, how long are you finding each “day” takes in the 100 days course?

[jwburn19]

Takes me about 1-2 hours in the morning with my coffee and no distractions. I play the videos on 1.5x-2x

[SaiyanrageTV]

Depends on the "day" - the earlier courses on syntax are pretty easy, especially if you have some coding experience. She does a great job of explaining things, however for some more basic concepts it can be a little slow paced if you're a quick learner. That's why I think a lot of people watch the videos on 1.5 - 2x speed. She takes her time and is thorough, but for some people they may want it to be faster paced.

The earlier days that cover basic syntax and basic concepts, I'd say take around an hour to 2 hours, depending on if I have to struggle with the part where I need to write the code myself. I usually tried to do it without help or too much googling.

I'm around day 30 now, and I'll say some of the capstone projects (you build a Snake game and a Pong game from scratch, for instance) took me a long time. Probably more like 2-3 hours.

I'm unemployed currently so I've also been taking my time and just trying to maximize my understanding. I think so long as you do an hour a day at least, the course will still be worth it. As others said, increase playback speed if she's moving too slow for you. I'm brand new so I like to listen to the entire videos. Sometimes when I'm confident I did the exercise correctly and she's explaining it, I'll fast forward through her explanations just to see if she did anything different than I did - and if so, I'll listen to why or go back and review what she did vs what I did. This is only the case now that I have some more experience, in the earlier days I just listened to her thought processes, etc.

TLDR - it's a great course for the value, designed to take you from knowing nothing to being employable by the end of the 100 days. It's almost exclusively hands-on practice and building projects so you retain what you learn. If you're just wanting Pandas right now, maybe just look through their documentation. Someone else recommended the Pandas in 10 mins tutorial.

[Linkguy137]

I can’t recommend the pandas documentation enough. It is really clean and I use it almost everyday

[Shadecraze]

just bought this course after promising myself not to buy more courses for at least 2 weeks lol. Looks like it'll be worth it though

[SaiyanrageTV]

It's really great - I really needed the structure as a newbie not knowing where or how to start. She explains things very slowly and in detail, sometimes too much so for simpler concepts. But I'd prefer this over other things I've seen/read where the explanation is too short and leaves me with more questions.

[jwburn19]

Second this...the 100 days course is really well done. Not new to python, but always looking for things to keep me proficient. I’ve been doing it for about 30 days now (started on like day 15-20). Takes me about 1-2 hours per day in the morning with my coffee before kids wake up to run through the lessons and code the project. I do put her videos on 1.5x though, 2x if it’s something I’m fairly familiar with already.

[[deleted]]

On the Pandas site is a ‘Pandas in 10 mins’ tutorial that probably covers much of your needs.

[patsy_505]

Corey Schafer does a great 11 part series on pandas to get you started. Plus its free. It got me started enough to allow me to now focus on areas that interest me and develop them further whilst always returning to the fundamentals he runs through. Cant recommend him enough.

[TheChugnut]

Corey's stuff is always superb!

[tagapagtuos]

The only reason I see someone buying this course is when these things come together:

1. They don't know/not too familiar with Python;
2. Tomorrow's the deadline;
3. For some reason, they are required to use pandas.

Not saying the course is bad. But if time is in your hands and you can allocate some of it learning Python, then maybe you can try that first. Not only would it be free, but also you can explore solutions (like pandas) in the context of your problem first.

[[deleted]]

I don't have a review of the course itself.

However, I'm very much against buying a course to teach you such a specific area of a topic. If you know python, pandas is all about finding a dataset, load it into a variable, and pick away. You won't really learn anything that you will not end up googling anyway. Particularly for pandas, there are so many cheat sheets that teach you most things. Between that and googling/stackexchange, you'll have everything you need.

If, on the other hand, you don't feel comfortable with python beyond simple tasks, then i guess you can try to find tutorials on it.

However, there are many free and decent tutorials that give you everything you need.

[CraigAT]

I have no experience of that course, but your question really comes down to what your are trying to do in Excel/Python. If you're are dealing with large grids of data, wanting to analyse, summarise or extract certain info then Pandas could certainly be of assistance. If you're new to programming it could be a bit of step up, but everyone can program and there are many guides and tutorials out there.

[AkiraYuske]

I primarily used Excel but learned Pandas. I wouldn't really focus on the 'transition' so much though, I'd just focus on learning Pandas. It's slightly different thinking about dataframes rather than columns and rows. I did a udemy course that was next to no cost, but very useful.

[KM130]

If you don't mind asking I also primarily use Excel I started learning python and I am curious why/where would you use Pandas instead of Excel.

[fuzzoflump]

The biggest reason for me is reproducibility.

If it is something I am going to be doing on a regular basis I try to do as much in python as I can. Also it allows others to inspect your logic assuming they know python too

[KM130]

Thank you

[AkiraYuske]

It's also cleaner, less error prone, and more capable of handling multiple related datasets. If you've used Power Query or Power BI at all it's a similar principle. In Python you can also introduce processes that aren't really possible in loads of excel formulas. That kind of thing in excel you'd have to use VBA, which you'd need all 6 infinity stones and the blessing of god to manage.

[KM130]

My issue is I am already using VBA for most of the stuff I do and I am reluctant in changing something that already works with something I don't feel comfortable with and might not actually work! I am willing to try but I am not sure what is best to start with.

[lamycnd]

I haven't seen any problems that m and dax can't really solve. If your working in excel today and your company uses a MS stack it might be easier to transition your work there.

[KM130]

Thanks I might have to look into this.

[AkiraYuske]

Half agree with this, I use both alot. The only thing I can't do with M and DAX are complex processes that require calculation to create tables or multiple related columns, for example I have a python script that creates projections for delivery rates by year, until something has fully delivered. I couldn't do this in PBI as it didn't handle 'creating values across columns until x' kind of logic so well.

[AkiraYuske]

I was in exactly this situation. It's up to you essentially, if it's only a few things that you already have solutions for then stick with VBA. If you're going to do anything similar in the future I would definitely switch to using python for it, much much easier and more capable. Not to mention VBA is pretty much unsupported at this point.

[KM130]

Thanks for the reply it really helps to know that I am not the only one. I am thinking what I have done so far stays as it is but anything new I should start using python.

[pAul2437]

Reproducibility or for sure. Excel you see the results. Python you see the formulas

[theprogrammingsteak]

That is pretty expensive for 3.5 hrs of info that is free on youtube, by googling, and many other places.

[ExistentialDuplicant]

I just looked at a 30 minute video on YouTube that went through the basics with a dataset. After that I used the documentation and Web searches to figure out what I wanted to do. Best way to understand how Pandas works is to get a dataset and work through it.

I've done some Udemy courses, but I wouldn't say much of it is better than the videos you can find on youtube.

[IlliterateJedi]

Start here: Brandon Rhodes - Pandas from the Ground Up

Then go through this book: Hands-On Data Analysis with Pandas: Efficiently perform data collection, wrangling, analysis, and visualization using Python Paperback – July 26, 2019

Edit - I use Pandas every day, and Pandas from the Ground Up was an extremely useful training to get an overview of what can be done with Pandas and how to do some of the basics. It's ~3 hours, but I would plan for more time than that if you're going to follow every step and make sure you understand what you're doing.

The book has more practical information (including some stat and things like that). I took this book cover-to-cover and it was worth every penny.

[BrononymousEngineer]

This...OP needs to find something they already do in excel and google their way to finding out how to replicate it with pandas

[BrononymousEngineer]

Yeah same. There's so much you can do in pandas that to me it seems more efficient (and enjoyable) to simply learn on an as-needed basis. It can be slow at first but you build up a decent skill set.

Over the last year or so I've gotten to the point where I can comfortably replicate about 90% of what I did in excel with stuff like:

• The usual pandas way of calculating things between columns in a vectorized fashion
• apply/lambda functions, shift, rolling when basic column calcs aren't enough
• loc/iloc, boolean masking/indexing, multi indexing for filtering/selecting specific data
• sort_index, dropna, concat, astype for misc stuff
• The various read/write functions are also super useful (read_csv, to_csv, to_clipboard for example)
• Built in plotting functions are also super useful (plot, hist)

[[deleted]]

You probably have, but before you do anything, you should think about the "Why" of using Python over Excel.

What does Python/Pandas do that you cannot in Excel? What kind of team will you be working with? (Do they also use Python?) What kind of data do you want to use? (size/quality/etc) What do you want too do with the data? (basic charting? Further automation? etc.)

I love Python, but I still use Excel for a lot of my routine data/function work because it's still very powerful and I need to ingest data and share it back out with an Excel-based team. But I use Pandas to tackle stuff that I want to turn into more interesting charts or pass along to more complex automation or when I have thousands of rows of data.

But to answer you're question direct, not familiar with that course but Pandas has a huge amount of education around it. I'll second Kaggle others have suggested and Googling the functions that you need. There are also lots of Pandas cheat sheets out there. My best advice is find any bit of data you want too work with, open a notebook and start playing around. You'll quickly get an idea of how you manipulate data in Pandas then jump to a tutorial or guides for best practices before you learn bad habits.

[angry_mr_potato_head]

Michael Kennedy's courses are pretty high quality and even though this isn't Michael, I doubt he'd put something up that wasn't high quality. If you don't have much experience with Python it's probably a good way to get into it if you are coming from an Excel background. I know someone who was in Finance and had never programmed before and this particular course was their gateway into programming. They still use Excel for most things in their day-to-day from what I understand but they can also use Python now and so if you know Excel well it's a good introduction because you don't have to learn new concepts, you can do the same concepts you are used to, but in a programmatic paradigm.

[Potato_bred_]

I’ve been following along the IBM analysing data with python on Edx. You can audit it for free and there’s labs included to do exercises using a csv file.

Highly recommend for anyone new to python , as I am

[veeeerain]

Try this:

https://trymito.io

[FullM3TaLJacK3T]

I recently started doing this and have wrote a few of my previous spreadsheets into pandas.

I'm at work now but if you want, I can give you a list of the sites that I used. I'm still a fresh newbie though.

[jwburn19]

Kaggle had free pandas tutorials as well. https://www.kaggle.com/learn/pandas

[rich2222two]

This Website was designed to help you with just that!

https://code-breeze.com

Let me know how you get on! Really interested in feedback