Using tools

Out of the box, Quantitative Commons contains over 150 tools to load, export, cleanse, transform, enrich, visualize and analyze data. Tools are exogenous to the application; they live in a library that may be expanded with many more tools as needed. If recording is active, any use of a tool is saved to a workflow.

Some tools are directly associated to the data pane. Changing a value in a datagrid cell, sorting a column or dragging it to a new position are, for example, to be regarded as tools that will be saved into a workflow if recording is active. Other tools are found by right clicking a column (or a row) in the data pane. This way you may, for example, add, delete and rename columns, as well as copying and pasting column data and changing the data type of a column.

Most tools are, however, found under one of the top-level menus. Selecting a category from one of these menus reveals a list of tools in the right pane of the application window. The In/Out menu item contains tools to load and export data, the Transform menu item contains tools to cleanse, transform, convert and enrich data, and the Analyze menu item contains tools to visualize and to perform many types of calculations and analysis upon loaded data.

Selecting a tool in the list of tools reveals user input controls associated with that tool. In general, a tool affects whatever column is selected in the data pane, and any other necessary input must be entered in input controls. Information about each tool can by found by clicking the blue information icon located above the user controls of each tool.

When user input has been entered, the tool is executed by clicking the Execute operation-button.

When entering input into textboxes, two keywords are available to make the input dynamic when using the operation in a workflow. Entering “from memory” followed by an integer between 1 and 5 (f. ex. “from memory1”) will use any value held in the corresponding memory slot as the textbox value. Entering “ask user:” followed by an arbitrary message will launch a window prompting the user to supply a value for the textbox (f. ex. “ask user: enter current weekday”).

Any error encountered using a tool will result in an error message containing some information about what went wrong. If an error happens when recording a workflow, the erroneous operation will not be saved, it is safe to continue recording.