Polishing the Seasonality Data
This is something that I find very interesting about people in the business world - their almost complete reliance on Excel. It's as if they can't even function without it. Case in point, JSON data. Here's a section of a file that I sent to a business person today:
{ "cleveland": { "Academic Tutor": [100.0, 100.0, 100.0], "Airplane": [100.0, 100.0, 100.0], } }
and there are clearly more lines in the file than this, but they all follow this same pattern. I thought it was pretty easy to understand: City, then Service, and then monthly values (12 versus the 3 I show).
But once again, I'm surprised.
The response was "Can you put it into something I can export in Excel?"
Forgetting that they don't know the difference between import and export, I find it really hard to look at the file above and see how it's different from Excel - save the graphs. But you know… that's the tool they know how to use, and that means that's the tool I need to give them data for.
So I modified my code to spit out CSV or JSON.
Worked just fine, but I'm still wondering what the real limits are for a lot of business people.