Question

First, I dont have any experience with programming. If I ever start, then this would be probably my first. I keep looking for answer until I found this site.

I am looking outside the box because in excel doing a data of 1 million + row and 20 + column would take a very long time just to wait for the calculation to be done and the copy and paste with formula would take longer. Imagine I have to let the computer running for 8+ hours with the helps of marco and F4 (repeat). All my formula have to paste into number only with I have done with the formula. And even I break the files into piece, the files sizes are 20MB to 110MB without active formula. Opening the file is taking forever.

I wonder how to write a programme with 1) dialog box, 2) the excel command and formula (sort, delimiter, concatenate), 3) ability to create graph, 4) with tabs to view different set of data or graph 5) add in a set of data 6) limiting the number (1-100000), etc. Outlook something look like utorrent.

What compiler suitable for this programme? It’s easier you tell me which ‘book’ to read that me finding which ‘book’ is suitable because even if it is I might flip it through and go on to the next one. ‘book’ may refer to book, way, steps, etc.

Answer 1

I can’t believe I’m about to say this (for most things I do it would be the wrong choice) but:

If the computations aren’t that complex (just lots of them) Python might be a good bet.

If you can get the input as a CSV file than, for about 10 lines of code, you can write a loop that will be run for each line of input and hands you the values to play with.

for line in open('filename', 'w')
  values = line.split(',')
  #values has the values from this line as strings.
  #these can be converted to numbers:

  x = float(values[0])
  n = int(values[1])
  #... and then processed

That might not be the cleanest/best approach but it’s simple and straight forward.

p.s. For 1M+ rows, don’t expect it to be blazing fast (10 sec to a min or so, depending on what you do to the data)