Thursday 7 February 2013

Automatic report generation: part 4


This is the fourth of three posts (!) that show how Mathematica can automate the processing of data -- an addendum that shows some newly created features.

The new feature added is a function to compare various periods: month vs month, quarter vs quarter, calendar/financial year vs calendar/financial year, and year-to-date vs year-to-date.

Note that the recording was made on a 7 year old 32 bit computer (running Mathematica V8) and some of the operations shown were slowed down by having to run the recording.

The key take home message I'd like viewers to get from both these posts and the rail freight post is that mundane data processing tasks can be automated. It doesn't matter what format your data is in, as long as the format is coming consistently your data processing can be automated. Additionally this could be taken a step further can all be done in the background and scheduled to run as given times -- but there would be no video to show in that case!

This video is best viewed in full screen mode.


Wednesday 6 February 2013

Point and click "Tableau-like" visuals in Mathematica: Part 2

This video shows an interactive application that displays Excel data -- although the source could be any of a wide variety of formats. Some dummy data on house sales activity is imported and displayed. The user chooses the locality they want to focus on and can adjust the viewing period. The bubble chart shows fraction of pending sales over the viewable period.

A more advanced version would link to e.g. Google Maps to display the location data automatically.

Note that the recording was made on a 7 year old 32 bit computer (running Mathematica V8) and some of the operations shown were slowed down by having to run the recording.

The key take home message I'd like viewers to get from this and other similar posts is that mundane data processing tasks can be automated. It doesn't matter what format your data is in, as long as the format is coming consistently your data processing can be automated.

This video is best viewed in full screen mode.