What new features would you like to see?

Feature request
1

What new features would you like to see in Easy Data Transform?

  • Undo/Redo
  • Multi-threading for more speed
  • Built in charts and graphs
  • Support for more input/output formats
  • Support for database input/output
  • Support for web input/output
  • Additional transforms
  • Support for Linux
  • Integration with other tools
  • Support for multiple screens
  • Something else?
2

Undo / Redo would be awesome! (along with Copy / Paste functions). :slight_smile:

2 Likes
3

@Adam
Regarding copy/paste:

  • Do you think you would use this to copy/paste within a .transform or between .transforms?
  • You can already right click on an item in the centre pane and ‘duplicate branch’.
4

@Admin

Yes, the duplicate branch is helpful for working within transforms. But to copy a string from one transform to another would be a nice to have item. I use certain transforms as template files, and would like to combine parts and pieces between them when needed.

Thanks!

1 Like
5

@Adam
The issue is: if you copy part of a chain of transforms without the input(s), all the column related options in the transforms copied will be nuked when they are pasted without the input item (because there are no longer any columns). Still thinking about whether there is a good way around that.

6

Yeah, I understand - it may not be possible. Thanks for considering!

1 Like
7

It would be really nice if the newer versions installed over the older ones without having to manually delete the older version, clean up the Registry, and delete old links.

2 Likes
8

Date manipulation, by example:
weekday (mon, tue,…)
weeknumber
difference between two dates
adding n days to a date
and if anyone could suggest how to do those in javascript, will be great!

4 Likes
9

Definitely undo/redo and multi-threading would be top of my list.

1 Like
10

@John
We use the current approach because it makes it easy to have more than 1 version installed. Running the uninstaller on the old version should clean up everything. But we will consider a change of approach in future.

11

@msaiz
Those are all doable in the ‘Javascript’ transform. See:

If you get stuck on a particular one, please make a new post in this forum as a ‘Question’.

1 Like
12

@Johnnycash
Undo/Redo is high on the wishlist, but needs to be carefully thought through so EDT doesn’t end up using all the RAM on your computer.
Multi-threading will only help if you have parallel branches in your .transform (not a single linear sequence). Is that the case? How long is the .transform taking to run now?

13

@Admin

I certainly understand there are considerations probably in all the options you wrote above. In most of my work I have paralel branches because I normally use EDT with multiple sources and several branches. Allow me also to ask some more questions about some of the other ideas:

  • what would come up on the support for multiple screens? I’m not sure I understand that one.
  • what integration with other tools are you guys thinking about?

I would also say that having more liberty to move nodes and branches around the screen would be a nice to have. Or to expand the working area.

14

@Johnnycash
Multiple screens - Some customers have asked to have the option to have the right pane displayed on a second monitor.
Integration - We don’t have any prior agenda on this one. it depends on what existing systems customers are integrating EDT into.

Hopefully that is already easy to do. Just drag a ‘rubber box’ around the items you want to move and drag them. The canvas should expand as needed.

15

Hello,
Ordering by my interest in them:

  1. Undo/Redo would certainly be very useful
  2. Frequency calculation to count unique items in selected columns (cities, zip codes, sex, whatever) with output in columns such as City | Count of City | zip codes | Count of zip codes | sex | Count of sex | whatever | Count of whatever
  3. Support for web input would be grand
  4. Calculation/transform output displayed in a resizable window allowing selection and copying. The window could be called from the choicebox (in the blue square in the capture) or with a button (mockup in the green square) without the need to open Excel, Numbers or whatever app is associated with CSV
    Output
    Output788×186 16.8 KB
  5. Calculations for the masses including date calculations (years / months / weeks / days / minutes / seconds / milliseconds) without using javascript, even if it is fun to code…
  6. Multi-threading
  7. Built-in charts and graphs may be useful, but possibly beyond the scope of EDT
  8. Support for multiple screens or floating panes that can be moved out of the way
  9. Support for more input/output formats may be useful (SPSS), but XLS/CSV files can already be imported by almost any statistics package
1 Like
16

You can use Count to count the number of unique values in a column. Each Count only works on one column though. You could merge the results, but I am not sure it would make sense to merge multiple Count results into 1 dataset.

Do you have a particular web app in mind?

You can copy from the existing table. Just select the row, column or cells and Ctrl+C (Windows) or Cmd-C (Mac). Admittedly, it isn’t particularly obvious. Or did you have something else in mind?

A transform that works out the difference between dates in 2 columns in seconds/hours/days/months etc, without Javascript, might be useful.

It says at SPSS System Data File Format Family (.sav)

“The SPSS Statistics File Format is a proprietary binary format”. That doesn’t sound promising!

17

How about the ability to create templates? For example, I usually start my transformations with the following transforms, Sample, Header, Whitespace, and summary.
I know we can use the awesome batching function, but templates can be useful.

2 Likes
18

A Statistic Transform Summary report that returns one or more of the following, mean, mode, median, standard deviation, normality, and so on.

1 Like
19

Frequency calculations I am currently doing as you suggest, but I get multiple sheets in my XLS output sheet, which makes it laborious to move data in reports.

Web input could be data from a page or an online file such as: https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfsstatic/dam/assets/13187404/master
Which links to an XLS file

copy from the existing table I currently do as you suggest, but given the size of the output window it is a wee bit awkward for datasets with more than a few columns/rows

Input/output formats I concur with your position about SPSS.
While searching for data I stumbled (again) on px files (PC-Axis) such as: https://www.bfs.admin.ch/bfsstatic/dam/assets/13347326/master
This data is used for population analysis (registries / statistics / …)
Here is information on the file format: https://www.scb.se/en/services/statistical-programs-for-px-files/px-file-format/
https://exversiondata.wordpress.com/2014/06/17/obscure-data-formats-px-files/
https://github.com/lukasmartinelli/px-to-csv

1 Like
20

Another useful transform would be a remove rows transform like the already existing remove columns.
This is useful to remove rows containing comments/blank rows/etc.

Unless I am missing an already available function, currently to do this I need to:

  1. Add row number (Row Num)
  2. Reorder columns to move row number column to first position (for convenience)
  3. Filter (remove) based on Row Num