Taking care of business, one python script at a time
Posted by Chris Moffitt in articles
In my last article, I presented a flowchart that can be useful for those trying to select the appropriate python library for a visualization task. Based on some comments from that article, I decided to use Bokeh to create waterfall charts and bullet graphs. The rest of this article shows how to use Bokeh to create these unique and useful visualizations.
Posted by Chris Moffitt in articles
This brief article introduces a flowchart that shows how to select a python visualization tool for the job at hand. The criteria for choosing the tools is weighted more towards the “common” tools out there that have been in use for several years. There may be some debate about some of the recommendations but I believe this should be helpful for someone that is new to the python visualization landscape and trying to make a decision about where to invest their time to learn how to use one of these libraries.
Posted by Chris Moffitt in articles
When doing data analysis, it is important to make sure you are using the correct data types; otherwise you may get unexpected results or errors. In the case of pandas, it will correctly infer data types in many cases and you can move on with your analysis without any further thought on the topic.
Despite how well pandas works, at some point in your data analysis processes, you
will likely need to explicitly convert data from one type to another. This article
will discuss the basic pandas data types (aka dtypes), how they map to
python and numpy data types and the options for converting from one pandas type to another.
Posted by Chris Moffitt in articles
Jake VanderPlas covered this topic in his PyCon 2017 talk and the landscape has probably gotten even more confusing in the year since this talk was presented.
Jake is also one of the creators of Altair (discussed in this post) and is back with another plotting library called pdvega. This library leverages some of the concepts introduced in Altair but seeks to tackle a smaller subset of visualization problems. This article will go through a couple examples of using pdvega and compare it to the basic capabilities present in pandas today.
Posted by Chris Moffitt in articles
I recently had the need to take a couple pages out of a PDF and save it to a new PDF. This is a fairly simple task but every time I do it, it takes some time to figure out the right command line parameters to make it work. In addition, my co-workers wanted similar functionality and since they are not comfortable on the command line, I wanted to build a small graphical front end for this task.
One solution is to use Gooey which is a really good option that I cover in my prior article. However, I wanted to try out another library and decided to give appJar a try. This article will walk through an example of using appJar to create a GUI that allows a user to select a PDF, strip out one or more pages and save it to a new file. This approach is simple, useful and shows how to integrate a GUI into other python applications you create.
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