11 Comments
Dec 6, 2021Liked by T Coddington
author

Thank you. I'm not missing anything, I would need to download this for every week and stich them together, right? Ugh.

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Dec 6, 2021Liked by T Coddington

Do you know the python programming language? Because there are tools that can help.

https://www.datacamp.com/community/tutorials/python-excel-tutorial

https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/working-with-excel-spreadsheets-in-python/

talks about some of them.

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Yes, I figured this would be easy with Python. Currently, the way I do Python is I tell a couple of the (much) younger guys on my team to do stuff for me :) Unfortunately, there is no way for me to pretend this is related to their jobs.

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This stuff is really easy. Tell the much younger guys that you want to learn how to use PANDAS. They will fall all over each other trying to teach you this cool thing. This is job related -- you are acquiring an essential competence you never knew you needed before. You can even tell them that some rude woman on the internet (that would be me) told you that your life would be better if you had such competence. I promise to insult you with the correct words if you tell me what would help . :)

I teach python to the completely-naive all the time. Would we be in the same room I could teach you how to do this in about 5 hours, if you are a bad study, though there would still be many bits where you did not know why it works, just that it did. 3 hours if you are sharp.

Go spend an afternoon with your younger guys and say 'I need to learn how to use PANDAS and get things from an excel spreadsheet into PANDAS'. Please teach me.' Unless they are scared of you this should be an afternoon.

Whatever it is you do for renumeration will be much better done when everybody knows that they cannot bullshit you beyond a certain point. You will pull down the data, and find the bs yourself.

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I'm a little sad that you're not sure if I'm sharp or not 😁. I'm actually in the US so in-person tutoring is out of the question for now. I have focused a lot on the UK because that's where it seems good data sets are available.

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There goes my crafty little plan to manipulate you to decide to learn python in 2 hours, just to show me that you are sharper than sharp! This manipulating people, doesn't work out so well! Who Knew! :)

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p.s. -- I am assuming that you are in the UK given the data you want to look at. Should you be on the West Coast of Sweden, I will come over some weekend and teach you this. But it's really an in-person thing, this teaching. The tutorials I gave you are much better than anything I have on hand or could make up on the fly. But in person I can go 'ah, that's a mistake. and I understand why you made it. let me correct my poor explanation earlier'. Yolping at each other over the net doesn't cut it nearly as well.

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Yes, you’ll need to stitch them. Lots of Excel time. Or PowerBI

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Someone in the UK Health Security Agency pointed me to https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1037938/Weekly_Influenza_and_COVID19_report_data_w48.xlsx . I believe the consolidated data I am looking for is in Figure 61.

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Sure looks like it. Thank you for posting the reference.

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