Pivot Table/Groupby/Sum question

[patrick.waldo at gmail.com]

On Dec 29, 3:00 pm, petr.jakes.... at gmail.com wrote:
> Patrick,
>
> in your first posting you are writing "... I'm trying to learn how to
> make pivot tables from some excel sheets...". Can you be more specific
> please? AFIK Excel offers very good support for pivot tables. So why
> to read tabular data from the Excel sheet and than transform it to
> pivot tabel in Python?
>
> Petr

Yes, I realize Excel has excellent support for pivot tables.  However,
I hate how Excel does it and, for my particular excel files, I need
them to be formated in an automated way because I will have a number
of them over time and I'd prefer just to have python do it in a flash
than to do it every time with Excel.

>It's about time you got a *concrete* idea of how something works.

Absolutely right.  I tend to take on ideas that I'm not ready for, in
the sense that I only started using Python some months ago for some
basic tasks and now I'm trying on some more complicated ones.  With
time, though, I will get a concrete idea of what python.exe does, but,
for someone who studied art history and not comp sci, I'm doing my
best to get a handle on all of it.  I think a pad of paper might be a
good way to visualize it.