Wednesday, January 19, 2011

Data management recommendation?

I have a bunch of data.
I made it out of clay.
And when it's dry and labelled,
I'll put it in a dossier.

I have some thousand or so data points, and I am looking for a program to organize them so that:
  • it is easy to cut and slice them and get nice graphs
  • it is easy to sort them on many dimensions
  • it is easy to enter more data points
This project started quite small, and so I felt ok simply using an openoffice spreadsheet. There is now enough data that openoffice (and Excel) has trouble with the size of the file.

Do you have a recommended/preferred method for managing data?


This post's theme word is scienter, "deliberately" or "knowingly." It's an adverb: he waggled his eyebrows scienter.
This post written like Isaac Asimov.

3 comments:

Rory said...

Perhaps a database with some sort of friendly client? Microsoft Access or File Maker Pro come to mind.

G said...

Just use ipython + pylab. The only thing possibly annoying is entering new data since it might require an extra keystroke or two per datacase. But you can store the raw data in a plain text file and add to that and then slice and sort however you want in python. And make plots of slices etc.

Christian Muise said...

What's a theory student doing with data?