Working with Excel Reference

While Excel can do a lot, our goal is to work outside of Excel with a fully featured programming language like Python. Our first step will be converting from Excel's binary format to plain text.

Basic Operations

  • Convert Excel to CSV using "Save As" under the file menu and select CSV
  • Use print first, second, third to display values.
  • Python counts from 0, not from 1.
  • # starts a comment.
  • Statements in a block must be indented (usually by four spaces).
  • help(thing) displays help.
  • len(thing) produces the length of a collection.
  • [value1, value2, value3, ...] creates a list.
  • list_name[i] selects the i'th value from a list.

Control Flow

  • Create a for loop to process elements in a collection one at a time:

    for variable in collection:
        ...body...
    
  • Create a conditional using if, elif, and else:

    if condition_1:
        ...body...
    elif condition_2:
        ...body...
    else:
        ...body...
    
  • Use == to test for equality.
  • X and Y is only true if both X and Y are true.
  • X or Y is true if either X or Y, or both, are true.
  • Use assert condition, message to check that something is true when the program is running.

Functions

  • def name(...params...) defines a new function.
  • def name(param=default) specifies a default value for a parameter.
  • Call a function using name(...values...).

Python Libraries

  • Import a library into a program using import libraryname.
  • The sys library contains:
    • sys.argv: the command-line arguments a program was run with.
    • sys.stdin, sys.stdout: standard input and output.
  • glob.glob(pattern) returns a list of files whose names match a pattern.

Arrays

  • import numpy to load the NumPy library.
  • array.shape gives the shape of an array.
  • array[x, y] selects a single element from an array.
  • low:high specifies a slice including elements from low to high-1.
  • array.mean(), array.max(), and array.min() calculate simple statistics.
  • array.mean(axis=0) calculates statistics across the specified axis.