Resolver one - Pythonic spreadsheets
Dec 24th, 2008 by harijay
Everytime I have struggled with syntax in Excel I have always longed to break free from the tyranny of its visual basic syntax. Although very powerful, excels formulae and their complex mix of parenthesis , square brackets , dollar signs and brackets always had me wishing that spreasheets spoke a language with a more readable syntax. When I first heard of Resolver One a pythonic spreadsheet on Jon Udels blog I couldn’t wait to try it out. I finally did just that .
This is kinda like my hello world of Resolver One spreadsheets . In this spreadsheet I play around with a few things I have struggled with in Excel. String manipulation: the bread and butter of Bioinformatics analysis , formatting and column formulae involving regular expressions and finally conditional formatting . Although resolver one exists mainly for windows platforms , I do run it with both Parallels on my mac and on Windows Vista computers i have access to . The spreadsheet is fairly snappy , but does slow down if you have a large number of cells ( when I had a 2000 sequences and 9 columns , it did take almost a minute to recalculate )
Resolver one I feel could potentially provide the user interface I always needed when interacting with data produced by my python programs. Since most data is very amenable to the spreadsheet setup , I see this being a very nifty tool in my informatics aresenal.
For now you can find my spreadsheet at this URL and watch the screencast at its full resolution on bioscreencast.com at this URL.
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[...] to solve using python . Python has even ensured that I jettison a desire to pick up Excel and instead adopt Resolver one , the pythonic spreadsheet instead . My only problem with python is the learning curve to pick up a [...]