Wednesday 23 January 2013

Automatic report generation: part 2

This is the second of three posts that show how Mathematica can automate the processing of data. This video shows some of the plotting features that are possible once the data has been processed.

1. Plots can be toggled to show, for example, monthly, quarterly, annual, and seasonal data.

2. Where a category that is plotted has nested line items a drill down button allows the break down of the line item to be shown.

3. Notes can be added to plots.

4. Underneath the plot the category being plotted is tabulated as a percentage of other categories/line items.

5. Plots, tables, and notes can be saved as PDFs for distribution among colleagues.

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.


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