Here are a few links to some recent data munging tips I picked up last week:
Database Relationships
MS Access field (column) descriptions:
- I’m looking for methods to access the metadata related to the columns.
- In general MS Access seems to hide these:
- http://blogannath.blogspot.com.au/2010/03/microsoft-access-tips-tricks-list-table.html
- “Field descriptions can be entered by the user when creating the table in design view. It is a highly encouraged practice since the description can provided valuable documentation about the purpose of each field in a table. The inability to extract the field descriptions as part of the table documentation using Access’s built-in documenter is therefore quite inconvenient.”
- I can see there is a C# method, but I’d need visual studio or someone to compile this I suppose?
- My mate Francis said: “you’ll have to use a script that uses the Microsoft OLE-DB, as in the stackoverflow answers. However, you don’t need Visual Studio or C# to do this, just any language that can interface with Windows COM objects. Python can do this, so this might be your excuse to finally learn it. I imagine there might even by a R library out there somewhere, although it would probably be more convenient to go the python route here.”
- To get started with COM and python, you could do worse than to start with
Data manipulation
- This guy has created some custom functions that look helpful
- Revolutions Blog links to several Data Wrangling resources
