54: Data Conversion with Pandas

We'll now explore Pandas which is the main way data scientists work with data. It's also a useful project outside of data science so it's worth using no matter what your future holds. The main thing Pandas provides is data conversion and a DataFrame structure which is used by many statistics and mathematics applications. We'll explore the concept of a DataFrame in the later exercises.

In this exercise you'll use Pandas to take the CSV file you created to output various formats for your bosses. You'll also use a tool called pandoc to generate this report. You don't have to use pandoc but it is an insanely useful tool for doing reports in various formats.

Introducing Pandoc

Pandoc's job is to take one text format and convert it to another format. It can take markdown files and convert them to HTML, PDF, ePub, and many other formats. This means you can write reports in nice easy to write markdown and then convert them to any format that's required for the job. Need to submit a LaTeX file to a journal? Pandoc. Need to submit HTML to the web server team? Pandoc.