Notebook Usage
Introduction
A Europa Notebook behaves like a Jupyter Notebook with some enhancements.
Europa Notebooks support code completion as you type.
Another enhancement is the ability to reorder a cell by dragging it using the mouse pointer. To drag a cell, click and hold on the “execution count” box (left side of the cell), and drag to the new location. An “insert line” will be shown where the cell will be moved if the mouse is released.
Add a cell
A cell can be added or inserted using a context menu that appears when the mouse hovers between cells (or just below the last cell).
The Add Cell Context Menu has two options:
'M↓' - inserts a Markdown cell
'<>' - insert a code cell
Alternatively, use can use the menu - ‘Cell’ > ‘Create New’.
Change cell type
To change a cell from Markdown to Code or vice versa, click ‘Convert to [Markdown|Code] Cell’ under the Cell Toolbar Menu.
Run a cell
To run a cell, you can ‘Shift + Enter’ in the cell, or click the ‘Run’ button in the Cell Toolbar.
Once a cell is run, an “execution count” is updated in the little box on the left side of the cell.
Set cell visibility
You have the option to hide the cell output, or the cell input (code). The latter option is useful for setting up Business Intelligence dashboards or reports.
For example, the following notebook defines a Sales Chart. Since we want to publish just the output, we toggle the Input Visibility from the menu in the Cell Toolbar.
Now we see just the output.
Europa Notebooks is capable of producing sophisticated and interactive charts. This capability can be further enhanced through a wide range of excellent charting libraries including:
Automatic Data Explorer Utility for Pandas Dataframes
Europa Notebooks provides a Data Explorer Utility for Pandas dataframes. It can be enabled by adding the following into your notebook:
import pandas as pd
pd.options.display.html.table_schema = True # Data Explorer on
pd.options.display.max_rows = None # Send all the data! (careful)A tabular view of the data is shown by default with the ability to sort, filter, etc.
There are also other built-in options to explorer the data set in a ‘point-and-click’ fashion.
Delete a cell
To delete a cell, click the ‘Trash’ icon in the Cell Toolbar.
Dark Mode
If you prefer working in Dark Mode, that can be set from the menu: ‘View’ > ‘Themes’ > ‘Dark’.
You can switch back to Light Mode using the same menu option.
Download notebook
To download a notebook from edit mode, select ‘Download (.ipynb)’ from the File menu.
You can also download a notebook from the read-only view by clicking ‘Download’ (top-right).
Downloaded notebooks are fully Jupyter compatible. One thing to be aware of is that the name of the Europa Notebook kernelspec is “python3”. If your local Jupyter instance doesn’t have the ‘Python 3’ kernel installed, or if it has a different name, you may need to open the notebook and then change the kernel type within Jupyter before you can edit.
Get help
In edit mode, you can access help, such as how to read and write datasets. To open the Help panel, click on the ‘Help’ button (top-right of page).
Clicking ‘Help’ slides in the Help Panel, which displays a list of help links.
Click on a topic to display the detail. To go back to the Help list, click on the ‘Back’ button in the Help Panel Header.
To close the Help Panel, the original Help button used to open the panel is now labelled ‘Close’; click this.