January 2026
Beginner to intermediate
272 pages
6h 31m
English
Content preview from Python in Excel Step-by-Step
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Chapter 6Data Table Fundamentals
As a Microsoft Excel user, you know that data tables come in three main forms:
- Excel tables
- PivotTables
- Tabular cell ranges
These are all examples of tabular data. This chapter looks at native tabular data structures in Python.
Every commonly used business analytics technique requires data to be structured as a table. This makes working with data tables using Python foundational.
6.1 INTRODUCING PANDAS
Python was originally built as a general-purpose programming language. As Python grew in popularity, its functionality was expanded with additional libraries to perform certain tasks.
For example, Python’s functionality was expanded to include building websites and doing analytics. In the case of analytics, Python originally had no native way to represent, and work with, entire tables of data.
The pandas library was developed to extend Python’s functionality to include data tables. The pandas library has become the most widely used Python library for analytics and data science.
The good news is that your experience working with data tables in Excel makes learning pandas quite straightforward.
6.1.1 AdventureWorks Data Analysis
As discussed in the Introduction, the remainder of this book uses an Excel workbook containing data from a hypothetical company named AdventureWorks.
The PythonInExcelStepByStep.xlsx workbook contains data exported from Microsoft’s AdventureWorksDW sample database. More information about this sample database is available ...
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