From the course: Advanced Hands-On Python: Working with Excel and Spreadsheet Data

Getting set up

From the course: Advanced Hands-On Python: Working with Excel and Spreadsheet Data

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Getting set up

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- [Instructor] There are a few simple steps to follow to get set up for this course. You can find all of the example code for this course in the GitHub repository at the link you see here on your screen. To use the code, you can fork a copy of this repository into your own GitHub account if you have one, or clone the repository to your machine locally, or you can just download the example code as a zip file. The code is organized into two main folders. There's Finished and Start, and both folders are organized according to the chapter in the course. The finished folder contains all of the examples in their finished working state so you can take a look at the code for each example to see how they work and compare the code to your own. The Start folder contains all of the examples in their starting state, which is the code I will be using to build each example toward the finished version. Obviously for this course, you will need to have Python installed on your computer, and you can get it from this link. Just go to python.org and click on the Downloads link. I'm going to assume that you already have experience working with Python code and that you are comfortable with concepts such as functions and using modules and so on. You don't need to be an expert in Python, but this is not the course to start with if you are not already familiar with Python programming. If you need to brush up on your Python knowledge, there are plenty of courses here in the library to help you. I suggest learning Python. In order to successfully complete this course, you're going to need to have Microsoft Excel, or at least a program that can read Excel files, since we're going to be creating and working with Excel documents using Python. You will also have to make sure that you have a couple of Python libraries installed for working with Excel and spreadsheet data, so open up your terminal program, and I'm going to use the pip utility that comes with Python to install the libraries that we need. They are xlsxwriter, openpyxl, and pandas. So I'm going to run that command and, oh, whoops, it's not pip, it's pip install, there we go, and you can see that I've already got these libraries installed on my machine, so I have the conditions already satisfied. You should see some output that these are getting installed on your computer when you run these commands. That's pretty much all you need to do to get set up for this course. Go ahead and place the example files on your computer where you want them, and then fire up your favorite text editor. I'm going to be using Visual Studio Code, and Visual Studio Code is a free editor from Microsoft. It's a great editor. It has great extensions for working with Python. If you decide to use VS Code, which I highly recommend, install the Python extension from the VS Code Marketplace, and that's really easy. Just click on this little icon that looks like a bunch of boxes, and then do a search on the word Python. The very first result, this one right here, the one from Microsoft, it has hundreds of millions of downloads, you can't go wrong. This is the one you want. So go ahead and install that, and then once you've completed these steps, you are ready to get started.

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