Excel to Python: A Data Analyst's Guide to Leaving Spreadsheets Behind (Data Engineering in Practice)

You already know how to think like a data analyst. You just don't know it's called Python yet. If you've spent years living inside Excel, building VLOOKUPs, nested IFs, and pivot tables until your formula bar looks like a foreign language, this book proves you already have the hardest skill mastered: the logic. What's been missing is the syntax, and syntax is the easy part. Excel to Python teaches pandas entirely through the spreadsheet skills you already own. Every single concept is introduced side by side with its Excel equivalent, so you're never learning something new, you're translating something familiar. VLOOKUP becomes merge. Pivot tables become groupby. AutoFilter becomes boolean indexing. Twelve messy tabs become one clean script that runs itself. By the capstone chapter, you'll rebuild a full monthly report, the kind that used to eat an entire day of copy-pasting and formula-dragging, into a single script that runs in under a minute, every month, without fail. What you'll learn: Opening and exploring data with pandas, the DataFrame way Selecting cells, rows, and columns like a spreadsheet, without the clicking Turning AutoFilter dropdowns into one-line boolean filters Replacing nested IF formulas with clean, scalable conditional logic Mastering merge, the fearless upgrade to VLOOKUP and INDEX/MATCH Combining dozens of files and sheets automatically, with zero copy-paste Rebuilding pivot tables with groupby and pivot_table Cleaning genuinely messy real-world data reliably, every time Working with dates without serial-number confusion Charting, styling, and exporting polished, presentation-ready reports Automating the entire process into a script that runs itself