Welcome to the 6th edition of this newsletter. There have been quite a few site updates since the last. Even if you saw the original article when it went live, I think it is helpful to review them again - especially if the original content was interesting to you. There are frequently additional tips in the comments.

Around the site

• Combining Multile Excel Worksheets Into a Single Pandas Dataframe covers a simple approach to parse multiple excel tabs into one DataFrame. I have found this to be a really useful trick.
• Happy Birthday Practical Business Python shares some of my thoughts and learning over the past 5 years of PB Python. Thanks to everyone that has supported the site over this time. One quick update from this article is that I am now using a new email newsletter provider. I may provide an update in future posts about what I needed to do to migrate away from Mailchimp and how I am creating my emails now.
• Binning Data with Pandas qcut and cut is based on some of Kevin Markham’s excellent tips. I wanted to dive into them a bit more.
• Cleaning Up Currency Data with Pandas is actually a discussion about the pandas object type and how it can be a little confusing in the way that it handles mixed data types such as strings and numbers in a single object column. There were also lots of good tips in the comments so it might be worth checking it out, even if you read the original article.
• I periodically do book reviews which are interesting to me but tend to not get much response both in the short term and via long term search results. The interesting thing is that I do get lots of interests from publishers once I publish a review. They all want to give me books for further review. Funny how that works! My point is, let me know if you like book reviews or not.
• Tips for Selecting Columns in a DataFrame dives a little deeper into using iloc for selecting columns. Some of these tricks have been really helpful to me when dealing with DataFrames with many columns.
• My latest article included some simple python code for creating shortcuts on a Windows machine. I wrote this out of some minor frustration with trying to creating links for new users to quickly launch a new environment. I highly recommend doing this shortcut approach to ease the transition for new python users on Windows.

Other news

• Altair just released a new version. If you haven’t looked at it in a while, check out some of the examples for a snapshot of what you can do with it.
• Scikit-Learn is out with version 0.22.0 which has some nice updates.
• I have mentioned docassemble before. I found this TalkPython podcast really interesting.

Final Words

Thanks again for subscribing to the newsletter. Feel free to forward it on to others that may be interested. Also, if you have thoughts on this newsletter, the blog or anything else, let me know, I do monitor this email address and will read everything that comes in and try to respond to all as well.