[Tutor] getting and using information dict objects

[Albert-Jan Roskam]

> I am trying to make a move from excel to python. My main need is

> economic data -- to do economic analysis.

If you say Python and Excel the first thing that comes to mind is the xlrd package

<snip> 

> The end game for me is making plots of variables, combining them, and
> doing regressions -- i cannot see how i might take what i'm getting
> from these FRED / Python dicts to actual data analysis.
> 
> Could someone please help me take these first steps?

I'm not familiar with the Fred package. Pandas (http://pandas.pydata.org/) seems to be perfect for what you're doing. It's an R-like layer on top of numpy. It can be used to read Excel and many other formats and it works well with matplotlib. It's a cool tool to manipulate/massage/munge data, then analyze it (though R has still more, often ueber-exotic, stats). Its origin lies in the analysis of... economic data. Best used with IPython.